What Happened with West Virginia’s Blockchain Voting Experiment?

https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/west-virginia-blockchain-voting-voatz.html

by randomwalker • 7 years ago

155 193 7 years ago

slate.com

blaser-waffle• 7 years ago

"We don’t really know—and that’s worrisome."

Isn't the point of the blockchain that you always know?

maeln2• 7 years ago

As far as i understand, the software used ("Voatz") is a private blockchain and there is no public information about who runs what.

As far as we know, Voatz could control all the peers in their blockchain making them able to change the vote as they please.

arrozconcosas2• 7 years ago

Yes, this. Voatz is holding a lot of power here and I can only imagine how well their solution is implemented. Do state or local governments even understand what they do?

pavlov• 7 years ago

David Gerard, a prominent blockchain skeptic who generally does his homework well, writes that Voatz is "running Hyperledger on four nodes [...] it’s just a single-user clustered database". [1]

[1] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/06/05/the-west-vir...

iamnotacrook• 7 years ago

If the blockchain is published can't people check 1) that the votes add up to the correct totals and 2) that their vote is reflected in the blockchain?

magashna• 7 years ago

Well you can't really know even if you go and submit a paper ballot. If you could verify your vote, you could sell it. I don't know if that's still a realistic scenario these days when Tammany Hall isn't literally beating people for votes, but it's a reason why you can't tie a vote to yourself individually.

sarbaz2• 7 years ago

You should check out Threeballot for a simple counterexample. The idea is that you xor together 3 ballots when you vote, but one of the three ballots is published. You have a 1/3 chance of catching manipulation.

JauntyHatAngle• 7 years ago

Always know what?

The initial point of a blockchain was to provide a mechanism for consensus in a system with multiple parties that lack trust for each other and with no Central arbiter.

Can we access this blockchain to view the votes? No? Then it's opaque to us. It's a private blockchain.

h4l0• 7 years ago

Blockchain for voting sounds like a terrible invitation to a terrible party. Voting is already a delicate subject which is really hard to secure on information systems. Researchers have spent decades to figure out a perfect solution but came short.

Blockchain has already surpassed its boundaries for multiple reasons. However, voting should be beyond that line. There are many questions that need to be answered before even thinking about using blockchain for voting.

- How will identification work?

- What is the proof-of-work scheme?

- How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.

- Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster. Blockchain is all public, how are you going to anonymize everything? IP addresses of transaction owners are already open.

Edit: Formatting.

sarbaz2• 7 years ago

What are the problems with researchers' solutions? There are some very good ideas out there.

malnourish• 7 years ago

I'm not familiar with the problems OP is referring to, but from my reading, most issues, in both security and methodology, have revolved around implementation.

Spooky233• 7 years ago

Blockchain doesn’t have to be all public and doesn’t require proof of work. You can have closed system blockchain schemes.

RL_Quine6• 7 years ago

So a system with trusted parties? Sounds like a database, so we can ignore the blockchain bit entirely.

not_a_cop754• 7 years ago

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it sounds like your main argument is that current blockchain does presently do these things with the goal of voting in mind, not that it can't do these things.

One benefit of blockchain is allowing extreme accountability, which seems to be a greater and greater requirement of democracy with large populations.

lalaland11253• 7 years ago

You get less accountability with a blockchain (or any digital voting) system as those systems are much harder to audit and have many more flaws than paper voting.

RL_Quine6• 7 years ago

How will identification work?

That's the whole problem, and always unsolved (because it's hard). You need to be able to ensure that votes are made by real people, that votes aren't duplicated, and that votes are included in a count. Some of this is easy, some of this is near impossible. None of this is solved by a blockchain, which is at its core simply a remarkably inefficient, if decentralized, timestamping system. When a "blockchain" is presented as a solution, ask why the trustworthiness of timestamping was holding back a particular technology before now.

babyloneleven• 7 years ago

Also, if you rely on a third party to do identification for you, you simply don't need a blockchain.

Blockchain is heavily constrained by the vital requirement of not trusting any third party whatsoever. If you relax this, you can build much simpler systems that are equally secure regarding non-repudiation and other properties but doesn't need proof of work.

orblivion4• 7 years ago

ZCash (from what I can understand of it) seems like it could be the basis to use. Suppose everyone sets up a wallet and they get paid one ZVoteCoin at voter registration. Then they go home and do a shielded transaction (you didn't even mention anonymity) to their favored candidate. Their wallet should tell them that the transaction went through.

MuffinFlavored2• 7 years ago

- How will identification work?

I'm always confused how I can apply for a mortgage / loan (aka a legally binding financial contract) online with just some details like my name + social security number, but this method of identification seems to not be acceptable when discussing voting?

mijamo• 7 years ago

Because people are not okay with their voting history being available to anybody, including the government?

packet_nerd2• 7 years ago

It really should not be acceptable for financial contracts either.

Consumers lost more than 16B to fraud in 2016:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/consumers-lost-more-than-16b...

The Equifax breach lost data of 145 million Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#May%E2%80%93July_2017_...

Passwords are still the norm for online authentication, despite providing terrible user-hostile security. The US social security number is used both as an identifier, and as a static never-changing password.

packet_nerd2• 7 years ago

The identification part is the key.

The federal government should issue a nationally recognized identity card to every person which contains a digital certificate around which anyone (especially government services) can build their authentication & authorization systems.

qrbLPHiKpiux• 7 years ago

Blockchain for voting sounds like a terrible invitation to a terrible party.

I'm expecting a ton of down-votes into oblivion for the following...

Because you can "chip it" doesn't mean you should.

And, just because you can apply technology to something, also doesn't mean you should.

Time and time again we are shown how vulnerable computers and digital data are.

Voting should be done on paper in local areas overseen by people from each party. They all watch the ballot box. They all see who comes in. Together, they count the votes in front of everyone else and tally them on a piece of paper. Then, they call to their higher-ups these numbers, and so on and so forth.

This is the safest way for anyone to vote.

chillacy• 7 years ago

Electronic voting would be extremely convenient, and could do wonders for voter participation rates. I trust my entire net worth to computer systems, why can computers sum up bank statements but not votes?

lojack• 7 years ago

- How will identification work?

In my mind this is the hardest problem to solve.

- What is the proof-of-work scheme?

It doesn't necessarily need to be proof-of-work and I'd think it makes sense to piggyback off a different trusted network of some kind.

- How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.

Do transactions actually get lost all that often? In my experience, transactions propagate the network pretty reliably and quickly. You can then look at the number of confirmed blocks to reliably check if its in the ledger.

- Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster. Blockchain is all public, how are you going to anonymize everything? IP addresses of transaction owners are already open.

IP addresses aren't stored, and the actual transaction could be layered on something like Tor to prevent tracing. You could also have physical voting centers. The important thing is that individual voters can verify their own vote.

One big concern I'd have that you didn't really touch on is around management of keys. In addition to identity verification, how do you handle theft of keys? If a key is stolen, how do you handle disputes to whats in the ledger? I would trust tech savvy people to keep their keys safe, but what about people who don't understand technology?

lawn3• 7 years ago

how do you handle theft of keys?

I don't have a good solution for this one, but maybe it's not as big of a problem as it appears at first glance.

If we assume that a key can be made invalid, in a public way so we all know which keys are marked as invalid (= stolen), then each voter can know if their vote is correctly handled or not. If it's not they can have a chance to dispute or change their vote, possibly going through some extra identification procedure.

With this scheme disputes gets handled by invalidating previous votes, but in a transparent manner to both. Yes this relies on individual voters to keep the system honest, so their votes aren't used improperly, but isn't this an improvement over the system today? Isn't it a more democratic trust based process rather than having to trust election workers not to cheat?

lawn3• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced voting on a blockchain is a good idea, but here are some thoughts:

Researchers have spent decades to figure out a perfect solution but came short.

That doesn't mean improvements can't be made. Researchers have spent decades to figure out peer-to-peer money as well, before Bitcoin was invented. But there are many other examples.

How will identification work?

Presumably in a similar way voting already works. Tokens are given out after IDs have been checked.

What is the proof-of-work scheme?

You can easily piggy-back on any existing cryptocurrency if you want.

How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.

You can easily verify that your vote ended up in the ledger. You can verify in seconds that a transaction has propagated in the network as well. Transactions very seldom get lost, unless you're specifically thinking of Bitcoin which suffer from transaction backlogs from time to time.

Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster.

This is the hard technical problem. There are anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero or ZCash (although there shielded transactions are opt-in) which obscures where transactions come from. Therefore it should be possible to create a system where a single vote cannot be traced back to its caster while you can still count the total number of votes and that a vote is only cast once (this is exactly the properties Monero and ZCash have).

SkyMarshal• 7 years ago

Researchers have spent decades to figure out a perfect solution but came short.

The problem is not with knowing how make a secure voting system. We already know how to do that and it's been in production in various states and counties for decades. I was lucky enough to grow up in one. It's not difficult.

The problem is that election administrators in many places aren't tech savvy enough to know the difference between a Diebold machine with no paper trail and weird hooks (like the ability to invert the results), and actually secure, reliable, easy-to-use systems.

Those folks are susceptible to skilled salesmen from big companies peddling insecure voting systems. As are politicians who have a say in which election machines are purchased, and who are looking for kickbacks, donations and revolving door jobs. That's the problem that needs solving.

DARPA and Galois are working on a standard that I hope the Federal Govt will eventually require for all Federal elections. Create the best possible, open, verifiable voting machine standard, allow any company to implement the standard, and then teach election administrators how to verify the implementation correctly adheres to the standard regardless who the manufacture was.

EGreg7• 7 years ago

1. Identification is not needed, only presenting a token, everyone gets exactly one token during the occasional registration. If you lose a token, you can get another one, deactivating the last ones.

2. There should not be any proof of work. Really, PoW is one of the worst things to secure a blockchain. In fact, you don’t need a blockchain. You just need a Merkle Tree. Blockchains are about ordering of transactions - the order here is irrelevant! (see caveat below)

3. How can you be sure every vote is counted in ANY system? As long as you can communicate your vote to a network, the gossip protocol takes care of it. Everyone gossips every vote to their neighbors, so just send it to a few nodes. Again - NO BLOCKCHAIN.

4. For each election, you fork a token to use. Then you simply participate in token mixers, like Monero rings. Put all your derived tokens into a hat, then each takes a token and uses it to cast a vote.

You may be wondering, what if someone votes with an “old” token version that hasn’t been mixed. First of all, we can require mixing. And secondly, they cryptographically signed over their token to someone else so when that someone votes with that token, it will override your vote for that token. Since they present your signature in the token history, that you signed it over.

This also allows us to have forms of democracy where you sign over tokens to other people for a timestamp range of, say, the next 1-2 years, to make decisions on your behalf. Better than representative democracy. More like a giant parliamentary system. You may pick a science expert to vote for scientific bills, and a criminal justice reform activist to vote for criminal justice bills.

We can get to near total participation in the democracy this way.

Caveat: although honest validators in each district can construct an eventually consistent Merkle tree by simply finding all validly signed tokens, ordering them lexicographically, and signing them, we DO need a “cutoff” time that they stop accepting offers. This is a Buridan’s ass problem, and it gets even hairier in a Byzantine Generals setting. We need to know that no one submitted a vote after the cutoff time. Thus, we need a two phase commit — each node has to gossip the cutoff time and other nodes have to acknowledge a widely gossipped message or get kicked out of the consensus. There are always edge cases to this — see Ripple’s consensus process for instance — and theoretically in very unlikely cases a “fork” can propagate to the population at large, one person thinking a vote was cast before the cutoff and the other thinking the vote was cast after the cutoff. But unless that handful of votes determines the entire election, that won’t matter. And frankly the same thing can happen even more with current systems.

arrozconcosas2• 7 years ago

It seems undemocratic to hide behind “proprietary technology” to describe the vote counting process. It’s a public process.

jrumbut2• 7 years ago

Just use paper ballots. The only useful election technology is scantron.

We do not need this. It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode.

A rundown on some of their security: https://mobile.twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/10266038003653...

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots?

It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vote counted, in an anonymous yet totally transparent and verifiable way.

newaccoutnas2• 7 years ago

To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.

jrumbut2• 7 years ago

Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.

michaelbuckbee• 7 years ago

Agreed, honestly out of all the different potential blockchain uses this particular solution has always struck me as having the most potential.

83457• 7 years ago

Are you suggesting a way to verify your vote was counted correctly is needed? Wouldn't that provide the ability for folks to sell their vote by being able to show someone else?

jedimastert• 7 years ago

How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots?

You can watch if you want, or even be a part of the counting. IIRC most paper ballot schemes have the counting be public in some form or another, so that opposing factions can call each other out if someone is cheating in some way.

specialist7• 7 years ago

Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted.

Blockchains for election administration are a digital form of physical chain of custody. Like when you move boxes between locations.

You're thinking of crypto voting schemes. None of which have proven feasible in the wild.

The Australian ballot form of election administration means private voting, public counting. For example, dropping your ballot into a box at a poll site.

Any process enabling any kind of post mortem verification is more akin to accounting, eg open ledger with credits and debts. That's the opposite of a secret ballot.

pjmorris• 7 years ago

Counting in public is the solution. You can attend the count yourself, or you can trust that the loser of the election will have people there to challenge any questionable moves made in the counting process.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 7 years ago

Here's my experience in Germany:

My polling station is less than 200m away. I have never waited more than two minutes to vote. All voting is with a pen on a paper ballot.

Once the precinct closes, you are allowed to stay and observe the counting. Because each polling place serves only a couple hundred voters, it is easy to follow the counting. As long as it is possible to do so without interfering, everyone can observe so closely they can read the actual ballots and verify that they are sorted into the correct piles. You can then watch the counting of those piles close enough to verify the count.

Later, you can go online and look up the row for your precinct in a spreadsheet.

This is end-to-end verifiability, and it is neither expensive nor unable to scale: A national election in Germany will see about 40 million voters.

What's most important: Unlike blockchain or any other online voting scheme, the whole process is easily understandable by everyone.

In times were every institution is suspected to be corrupt, being merely safe is not enough. It needs to be safe in a way that does not rely on experts in cryptography to say so.

I have seen only one valid objection to using this process in the US: It is far more common there to have elections with dozens of individual races and ballot issues. Germany usually has just two individual questions to be voted on, and maybe five when local and national races fall on the same day. Considering this, it would still be possible to use the process for the top X races on a given election day.

wittrock2• 7 years ago

A number of end-to-end verifiable voting systems have been proposed and fielded! See [0].

The key issue they try to solve is how to let you check your vote was counted without being able to prove who you voted for to anyone else, thus preventing coercion attacks.

Most of them rely on paper, but some [1], provide reasonable guarantees about online voting.

None of it involves blockchain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [1]: https://heliosvoting.org/

widforss• 7 years ago

I was actually able to verify that my vote was counted in the last European Parliament election. I voted for an obscure candidate from an obscure party, and my vote sure shows up on https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.htm...

theseadroid• 7 years ago

Many people can't afford to take the day off for voting. And even mail ballots are allowed, making the process easier would encourage more participation. Is this not a problem worth solving?

jacobush2• 7 years ago

Yes, it's worth solving. Here's another suggestion - make voting day a holiday.

the_snooze10• 7 years ago

It's not as clear-cut as you would think. https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-e...

jeltz2• 7 years ago

Sure, but can't that be solved for most people by holding elections on a Sunday and keeping the polls open from 08:00 to 20:00? That way it is only a small percentage who are unable to vote.

Sweden has this plus early voting and we have between 85% and 90% participation in our elections. The early voting of course make it easier to manipulate votes.

duxup3• 7 years ago

The optical system in Minnesota is great.

I fill out the paper ballot, so no matter what I've voted. It is really clear how to use the system, and I'm not waiting on technology no matter what happens next.

Then I roll it into the machine itself and it goes into a locked box attached to the machine.

There is always a paper record.

The machines and votes are tied together so auditing is straightforward.

specialist7• 7 years ago

The system you describe is currently the gold standard for election administration.

In "electionese":

Ballots issued, marked, and cast at a poll site.

Ballots tabulated at poll site the moment the polls close.

All materials and gear distributed from and to a central count.

All handling done in public in the presence of reps of all significant stake holders, election observers.

Receipts, logs, seals for everything.

Source: Was a poll inspector for years.

EGreg7• 7 years ago

Why simply deride electronic voting as a solution in search a problem? There are many problems it solves.

1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote.

2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-bec...)

3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won?

Aren’t these important enough problems for a democracy to solve?

Instead of simply downvoting, why not actually address what I am saying! I am going to go point by point.

Sure, absentee ballots are a thing, but guess what. People like apps. If it’s secure enough for everyone’s banking needs, why not for a vote?

You can make the same argument about money — that banking apps are a honeypot for thieves etc. And yet we have made banking apps so so secure that you’d use them to move thousands of dollars.

If everyone voted from their phone, it could be anonymous and cryptographically secure. And a Merkle tree would record all results.

What is the issue? Every problem you point out with electronics can be done with paper ballots, too.

The interface can lie to you? Has been done with butterfly ballots and others.

The vote counting process is rigged? Have different groups audit the process.

In fact, having cryptographically secure receipts makes it extra easy and fast to verify votes. Al Gore would have won, because they wouldn’t have has to take so much time for a recount:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ

Instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh, X is an issue!” why not simply work on fixing the issue?

So let’s run down the issues:

1. Not enough access to phones and computers

Fine, people without phones can still vote the old fashioned way.

2. Stealing a phone

A very inefficient way to fake a vote

3. Interfaces that lie to you

Ignoring the fact that machines already do this (https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M) the interfaces would need to be audited by different groups using each other’s interfaces in an anonymous manner (not like when Uber’s greyball https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... ). This is the general problem of the Trusted Computing Base.

4. Anonymity

Listen, should we know how every person voted?? We do now! Thanks Government. Best Voting System Ever (https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-...)

Erm sorry. The solution. Token mixing. You get one token per person, but then they go through a cryptographically securd mixer before being used to sign your vote. Kind of like with Monero rings.

5. Accountability

How can we prove the votes happened the way you wanted them to?

Well, YOU still have your token on YOUR phone (no one else does) so your app can audit the Merkle tree.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs would be overkill here because proving how you voted to someone else is important (See #3, above). In addition, ZK proofs are a bit ivory-tower idealistic since most people don’t have the knowhow to “produce a fake alternative vote”.

The Merkle Tree can consist of smaller branches, one for each district. The results can be tallied in near real time, and verified by anyone. Results would be known in real-time.

6. But realtime reporting will affect voters!

Yes, and it currently already does, with Ohio, Michigan, and so on. The current system makes some states way more important than others:

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016

Why not require all states to have primaries at the same time and not reveal the results til the end? This is a political, not technological, solution.

The only one major problem I see with electronic voting is #3, the trusted computing base. I listed the main solution above, but I am sure there will be many improvements on it.

the_snooze10• 7 years ago

1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote.

Improved accessibility from the status quo has minimal marginal effect on turnout. https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-e...

2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day.

Paper mail-in ballots are a well-established way to accomplish this, though they do have their own risks---specifically vote-buying and coercion. My county in California also allows curbside voting by appointment, which is pretty great for elderly voters.

3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won?

This is already a solved problem with precinct-counted optical scanned ballots.

I highly recommend you volunteer to be a poll worker the next time there's an election in your state. You'll learn a lot about the real problems on the ground. For example, in my precinct during the 2018 midterms, we encountered an issue with the voter rolls: the city had recently renamed a street but a lot of people's registrations still reflected the previous name, which slowed things down significantly.

specialist7• 7 years ago

Only two things have been proven to increase voter participation (in the USA):

Peer pressure, culture of voting (your neighbors noticing they didn't see you at the poll site).

Competitive races.

On the flip, there are many things which counteract vote suppression:

Universal, automatic voter registration (just like all other mature democracies).

Reenfranchise felons.

Fair redistricting.

Adequate funding for election administration.

I've not seen any data suggesting that digital voting schemes have or may boost voter participation. And there's numerous cases where such systems disenfranchised voters.

DrScientist2• 7 years ago

Here's the problems such a system would create.

- Voting in private on a phone app. The opportunity for coercion is huge. The brilliant thing about putting a cross on paper in a booth on your own and dropping into a box, is no-one knows how you voted - so no comeback.

- Anything in software has the opportunity for a large scale attack. The incentive for doing such attacks is large. Look at all the energy put into gerrymandering etc today - Why risk it?

- the ability to do a sensible audit is beyond most people - auditing a pile of paper is easy - anyone can participate. Software you'd need to trust a small priesthood - that's not democracy, and it's totally dangerous ( forget algorithms, the weak points are people ).

I'd also question your premise that low voter turn out is largely due to inconvenience. Sure for some, but I'd argue lack of participation is largely riven by other factors - like nobody worth voting for....

Finally paper system is easily adaptable - want a box for write ins? Move to single transferable vote? Just print different paper and people doing the counting can adjust - no software re-writes.

linuxftw• 7 years ago

Doesn't work either. In some districts, one candidate got more votes than actual ballots because some were 'accidentally scanned more than once.' In those situations, since the counts are off, the original vote stands.

So, just make sure you throw out all your extra ballots and you're fine.

Edit: 2016 US General

non-entity• 7 years ago

It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode.

I won't knock blockchain completely, because I don't believe I'm smart enough to, and it likely has many useful applications, but I feel like half the time I hear about blockchain, this quote is applicable.

specialist7• 7 years ago

This is a solution to the problem of more pork for vendors.

Any one wanting to understand why any of these changes occurs will be illuminated by better understanding the business models of the vendors and the appropriations (budgets) of the jurisdictions.

During the HAVA bonanza, which brought us the touchscreens, vendors envied high tech valuations, so repackaged themselves as product companies.

When that fad went bust (market saturation), vendors repackaged themselves as service companies. With a big difference from their prior incarnation. Changing from time & materials to charging a fee for every task for every voter every election.

Before, you'd buy ballots for expected turnout plus 10%.

Now, (with vote-by-mail) you buy the whole ballot packet, for every voter every election.

Before, you'd pay 10 cents for every voter signature verified.

Now, you pay for signature verification services for every voter every election.

It's astonishing how each and every step of the process has been monetized (rent seeking).

Huh. It just now occurs to me there's probably a better way to summarize the business practices of the vendors:

Just imagine what IT vendors like Oracle do to maximize revenue applied to election administration.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

well here is the rub, paper ballots are useless unless you can prove who is voting and yet we have nearly the same people yelling about how unfair it is to require people to prove who they are to vote.

you cannot have one without the other if your intent is to protect the system and to be honest you only need paper ballots as a receipt to allow verification in case of suspected interference. we have already seen that some paper ballot designs are more prone to fraud than others.

DrScientist2• 7 years ago

Yep. Paper totally rules here.

1. like paper money, anonymous - my vote should be secret.

2. Hard to do large scale fraud or manipulation - not being efficient or automatable is a feature guys...

3. Physically going to the polls, voting in public, yet private at the end really makes it hard to put pressure on people to vote one way or another. Compare that to voting electronically at home or in church or at work....

the_snooze10• 7 years ago

3b. You can spoil paper ballots during in-person voting, which means a photograph of your ballot is insufficient proof that you actually cast that particular ballot.

jimhefferon3• 7 years ago

Voatz’s website states that “a paper ballot is generated on election night” and is tallied “using the standard counting process at each participating county.” What that means is the voter’s vote is sent to the county clerk staff as a PDF, and the county clerk staff prints it out and puts it into the scanning tabulator.

?So at some point your vote is printed out on a paper, and scanned? Doesn't seem all that anonymous, for one thing.

yum_tasty4• 7 years ago

An anonymous id is attached to the pdf. Not the users specific name/information.

"The county clerks were able to conduct a pre-tabulation audit (unprecedented in US election history) by comparing anonymized copies of the voter verified digital receipts with the marked paper ballots prior to feeding the paper ballots into the scanners for seamless tabulation alongside the primary voting system."

jimhefferon3• 7 years ago

Can you say more? How do the clerks know it is a voter from their district without a name, or other identifying information?

mobilefriendly2• 7 years ago

I live in West Virginia and anything dealing with the state government has to start with an assumption that it is being done for corrupt reasons. Ask first how a contract or project financially benefits key state officials or their family. I can't emphasize enough how predatory and corrupt the government is here. Both leading Republican candidates for governor are under federal corruption investigations. There's a reason West Virginia is losing population and remains among the poorest states in the USA. Where West Virginia isn't corrupt, it is incompetent. The state can't even provide safe drinking water for its people, or even create a framework for official electronic signatures-- it has no business innovating in voting tech. West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology.

duxup3• 7 years ago

I suspect the incompetence is by design to some extent. If you like small government, cripple it and then you've got an excuse to limit its reach and continue to cut.

mobilefriendly2• 7 years ago

It isn't really small government culture-- both Republican candidates were very recently Democrats (the state has flipped parties). It is more a pervasive culture of natural resource extraction and disdain for the public's health and safety. Probably a function of the "resource curse". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

HillaryBriss4• 7 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, California is also failing to provide safe tap drinking water for everyone. In a few places, the wells are dry. In others the water is contaminated.

jedberg• 7 years ago

That's not anywhere close to the same thing. In California, the cause of that is climate change, not corruption. The sources for the rural communities are drying up. Secondly, the state is sending bottled water to the people who don't have clean drinking water. And third, the Governor just last week signed an appropriations bill that will provide millions for clean water projects out of the funds that were allocated for "green enhancement programs" because they recognize that this is the fault of climate change.

matty22• 7 years ago

Also a West Virginian, my favorite is when our entire supreme court were impeached at the same time: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636761241/west-virginia-house...

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

I have some family in WV (it's absolutely gorgeous) and the government is always fun conversation!

Ill_ban_myself• 7 years ago

And in this corner we have the national heavyweight champion, 8 time governor sent to prison CHI-TOWN!

sdinsn• 7 years ago

Note that West Virginia did not pay for anything. The project was paid for by a rich guy [1], Bradley Tusk.

[1] https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia...

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

I will say that your state is beautiful though. Driving from Harper's Ferry to Charleston via the Monogahela National Forest remains one of my trips. My favorite memory was discovering a 13,000 square mile radio quiet zone with a gigantic, black hole hunting, radio telescope smack dab in the middle of it.

After stopping to play tourist, I continued driving and stumbled upon a stranded 3 person group, a hetero couple and the wife's sister, the and that probably weighed 1500 pounds between the 3 of them (no judgements). Their minivan was out of commission, and there was no cellphone reception cuz quiet zone. I offered to help, but I could physically only fit one of them in my Ford Focus hatchback, which could normally fit up to 5 people (uncomfortably). Husband asked if I could get him to Durbin, about 30 minutes down the road, and I said yes. All 500 pounds of him squeezed into the front seat, which itself was an adventure because I am 6'5" and was a heftier 300 pounds myself, and he was spilling a bit into the driver's seat. I was basically squished between the car door and a human wall.

I loved every minute of it. Husband was an awesome dude. We chatted about his career bas a coal miner (complete with a mild case of black lung disease and pending heart failure), life in a sleepy area, and all sorts of stuff. When we got to Durbin, he just asked me to let him own, where he planned to find a phone to call his preacher, who also happened to be the "local" tow truck driver. He walked/waddled off towards some buildings off the main road, and I continued my journey.

infecto• 7 years ago

Such a strange way to be a little condescending but also not.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Ask first how a contract or project financially benefits key state officials or their family.

Typical flyover state simpletons. If they were were thinking long term like the enlightened people in the urban coastal states they would direct the proceeds of their corruption at their party. After doing this for a couple decades they can have a de-facto one party state and doll out government jobs and contracts to a much wider cross section than just their friends and family further cementing their party's (i.e. their professional network) grip on power.

(this is sarcasm, in case that isn't immediately obvious)

elwell• 7 years ago

West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology.

Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

I love your comment because I can't tell whether it's serious or an extremely well played HN parody.

nwah12• 7 years ago

When asked about why a redacted audit or report from the auditors wasn’t released, Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney, who co-authored the white paper, gave multiple reasons. First, he pointed to a nondisclosure agreement with the auditors. Then, he stated that there was no way to share any more information about the audit without revealing proprietary information about the system. But one would expect a redacted report or even an abstract of the report for transparency’s sake, given the stakes of introducing a new system to our already rickety voting process. Depending on the secrecy of its system architecture is such a poor security mechanism that researchers have even coined a term for it: security by obscurity.

diveloper• 7 years ago

Dang, I just moved to WV for a software dev internship for the summer. Is it okay to drink the water in Charleston?

dsr_• 7 years ago

Maybe? The annual water quality tests for chemical contamination look reasonable.

But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.

bloopernova• 7 years ago

get a reverse osmosis system. Or buy RO filtered water from the local grocery store by the 3 or 5 gallon jug.

Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.

professorgerm• 7 years ago

Yes. I assume they're referencing the chemical spill several years ago, and the water has tested clean consistently since.

I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.

nemacol• 7 years ago

WV resident here. (Northern Panhandle)

Anyone interesting some history of coal country, a great book is "Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area" By Harry M. Caudill. Published 1962.

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Dep...

https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcom...

While the focus of the book is eastern Kentucky, a lot of the content applies to WV and coal country in general.

"At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American Conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region."

thebeefytaco• 7 years ago

I think those comments safely apply to any government project.

DanCarvajal• 7 years ago

What other states are experimenting with memes?

apo• 7 years ago

What little has been described offers plenty of attack surface. The white paper has this to say about how paper copies of votes are printed out:

When the polls close, members of each county clerk’s staff insert two cryptographically secure thumb drives into the vendor’s administrative portal laptop. Once the two thumb drives are verified, votes on the blockchain are automatically assembled as PDF files for each county. The Secretary of State’s office sends each county one PDF file containing all the marked ballots submitted by voters of that county. The clerk’s staff prints the ballots on cardstock with a ballot printer capable of printing up to 20” two-sided ballots (see Fig. 4). Each printed ballot contains the anonymous ID of the voter (see highlight in Fig. 5). Tabulation and the consolidation of results is done automatically by scanning the paper ballot into the precinct tabulator of the primary voting system (see Fig. 6).

https://sos.wv.gov/FormSearch/Elections/Informational/West-V...

How do the clerks get these thumb drives? What's the protocol for storage until used? Who has access to them? What physical security features do the drives implement?

If I were going to attack this system, the thumb drives seem like a juicy target with plenty of social engineering opportunities.

lucasrabreu• 7 years ago

Chuck Rhoades stopped it

otabdeveloper4• 7 years ago

Presumably, it went wherever all the other 'blockchain experiments' went.

nebulous1• 7 years ago

Transparency/verifiability seems like almost the only half-way decent reason to use a blockchain for voting. And then they do it using a closed source undocumented proprietary blockchain.

josefx• 7 years ago

Until your boss fires you for not voting to the company line, of course not officially. Having a verifiable can turn into a double edged sword for many reasons.

robomartin• 7 years ago

"But how secure and accurate was the 2018 vote? It’s impossible to tell because the state and the company aren’t sharing the basic information experts say is necessary to properly evaluate whether the blockchain voting pilot was actually a resounding success."

...and that's when I stopped reading.

dcolkitt• 7 years ago

Blockchain is a buzzword, but we've already had strong cryptographic protocols for voting that predate Satoshi.

We've known for decades how to conduct elections where every vote is provably counted, any individual vote is completely anonymous, and the identity of every voter participant is provable (i.e. preventing ballot stuffing).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

yum_tasty4• 7 years ago

We've used horses for centuries... How dare anyone suggest that trains, planes or auto-mobiles could be useful.

grepthisab• 7 years ago

Really bad take. Blockchain offers no benefits to what provably worked in the past, whereas there are many advantages to planes, etc. over horses.

rebuilder• 7 years ago

This seems so preposterous I have a hard time believing the story is being reported correctly. The state or Voatz are apparently unwilling to prove their system is secure. What are they going to do if someone disputes the results of the election?

egypturnash• 7 years ago

Voatz.

Voatz.

Yes, let's trust a bunch of people who think "Voatz" is a good, adult name for a tool for a crucial part of the process of democracy.

What Happened with West Virginia’s Blockchain Voting Experiment?

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