USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

https://heraldsheets.com/us-postal-service-usps-files-patent-for-blockchain-based-voting-system/

by seigando • 6 years ago

299 371 6 years ago

foepys5• 6 years ago

All blockchain (and electronic for that matter) voting systems are inherently bad because they are not easy to verify.

Nothing beats pen and paper in verifiability and ease of use. If done right with many eyes on the ballots, manipulation requires thousands of co-conspirators. The only downside is the slow speed.

another-dave• 6 years ago

Some people also argue that the pen and paper method, by not being instant, drive some extra engagement in the political process, so could be seen as another positive rather than a downside — coverage of vote counting can go on for hours (or days) and it's the one time that democracy is visibly "exciting".

This feels like it has a ring of truth to it, but then personally I'm interested in politics so maybe that's a self selection bias — would be interesting if there was a formal study on this.

colordrops• 6 years ago

You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote can't be altered.

foepys5• 6 years ago

How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? That when they vote for X that the counter for X is increasing by 1? By verify I mean full understanding of the process without the need to believe somebody who calls themselves an "expert".

galkk• 6 years ago

As I see, the problem is not that the vote can be altered, but that the vote can be bought and the fact that person voted in the right fashion could be verified by 3-rd party much more easily (screenshots/whatever).

The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.

Scarblac2• 6 years ago

It's not anonymous enough. If you sell your vote or are coerced, you can show your proof to the buyer.

cheph4• 6 years ago

The only downside is the slow speed.

Worth it given how important it is.

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

My whole startup is built on blockchain, and I'm an Estonian e-Resident (Estonia allows their citizens to vote digitally), so I find blockchain voting fascinating. That said, there are some problems with it. This Tom Scott video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs.

But this is a very cool idea: combining the USPS vote-by-mail infrastructure with a blockchain layer that sits on top, used mainly to provide anonymous provenance. We'll see if this ever gets implemented, but I think it's a great example of the non-hype uses for blockchains being explored.

peignoir• 6 years ago

Oh cool, not related to the article directly but I m off to Estonia and working on a blockchain (tezos) voting system and community if interested : www.electis.io

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

Interesting. For lower stakes voting, this could be a great implementation. I have good friends building a Tezos startup right now (Tezsure) - certainly an interesting chain!

We're on Stellar mainly because of block times. You can see a beta of our timestamping service (mainly built for scientists... launch coming soon) here: https://assembl.app/chronos

amelius• 6 years ago

Very nice video, though in the personally delivered sponsored message at the end he seems to be contradicting himself. Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

That's a good point.

I suppose it's poignant in a way — though we might wish to stop the tide, everything is digitizing. Voting will inevitably be swept up in this process, and it's not a matter of if we should do it or not, but how we do it best.

And for what it's worth, password managers are a very good idea (though probably not worth staking an election on). I would however recommend Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com, which is open-source and well-audited.

In cryptography we trust (and we probably will for voting someday soon as well)!

cheph4• 6 years ago

Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?

I think you should use a password manager, I do, and the people I know that don't keep forgetting their passwords, keep reusing them, and generally just practice horrible security.

As to which one, I would recommend an open source one like BitWarden, but they won't fund YouTube videos on important issues because they don't have the money.

I doubt Tom Scott would recommend that everyone in the world use this one password manager, and it won't happen from him endorsing it. And I think that integrity of elections are more important than the security of passwords, even though I guess they are somewhat intertwined. For important things multi factor auth should be used which won't be defeated by passwords only.

kfrzcode• 6 years ago

Electronic voting is a terrible idea.

Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale.

Here's Tom Scott with a great explanation of the basics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

ianleeclark• 6 years ago

Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale.

As it turns out, you can just impose austerity.

tdons• 6 years ago

The same argument applies to the internet at large. Shall we move back to filing cabinets because that makes data leaks more difficult?

I'm sure that at some point we'll crack the electronic voting nut. But yeah: it's scary and the stakes are high. Then again, we've fixed electronic banking and that runs pretty nicely without many problems -- right?

Swenrekcah3• 6 years ago

Electronic banking works prescicely because it isn't a secret semi-anonymous blockchain thing. If credit card payments end up in the wrong account, someone notices. If an electronic voting system assigns votes to the wrong candidate, who notices?

mhh__9• 6 years ago

There are next to no stakes with electronic banking compared to voting. Money is a totally different prospect to rigging an election.

The Trump campaign did some extremely shady things with Wikileaks and the GRU, can you imagine if he was now leading the US through COVID after the Russians were able to compromise the voting system? The constitution does not have a mechanism to deal with it, as far as I can see.

What's the point when paper works already and is almost impossible to scale. Voting is easy

Exorus18• 6 years ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/

nathias3• 6 years ago

We should be experimenting with electronic voting for 30 years and innovate solutions to its problems. Nobody thinks it doesn't have problems, but to just stop at pen and paper voting just means to affirm the problems of pen and paper which are IMO much worse. (scarce voting, batched issues)

fsh2• 6 years ago

Most european countries simply don't have any problems with pen and paper voting. Turnout is typically much larger than in the US with its crazy mix of electronic/mail-in/in-person voting. Probably this is due to automatic voter registration for all citizens, having the elections on Sunday or on a holiday, and (in some cases) not having a first-past-the-post system where a large fraction of votes don't matter anyway.

nathias3• 6 years ago

Yes we do, everyone has them. There is an unimaginable difference between a system where you can have a referendum on =X once per year and it costs 10mil or a system where you can have a referendum every second and it costs ~0. We can then vote for issues directly instead of having people that may or may not (as is most often the case) vote in a way they signal they would before elected.

Galanwe3• 6 years ago

What troubles me with this is that at some point in the system there will need to be a mapping "real identity" -> "ID of voter in the blockchain".

What happens the day this mapping leaks?

foepys5• 6 years ago

Even if that's solved: what happens when voters lose they key? Or worse: get it stolen from them.

soulofmischief• 6 years ago

Ideally you should be able to produce a unique hash each time you vote, derived from your master key. The server doesn't need to know your private key. This is how crypto works now, generating unique and theoretically unlinkable wallet addresses from a secret key.

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token, without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly with UX, and then at a low level the hardware used (the general public is very easy to hack if you have nation-state power).

marzell• 6 years ago

How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?

Galanwe3• 6 years ago

Hmm, not sure that would work though.

What happens when an ID is stolen? If there is nothing mapping "John Smith" to "ID #12345", then you have no way to revoke IDs because you cannot know if the person claiming the ID is the true owner.

Wouldn't that mean stealing IDs will be virtually un punishable, and reselling them very lucrative?

barbegal3• 6 years ago

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense.

Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each node. Without proof of work Blockchains are easily forgeable.

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

How do you prove the database hasn't been tampered with?

barbegal3• 6 years ago

You can't but how can you prove the blockchain hasn't been tampered with?

Scarblac2• 6 years ago

Make it public and put it in version control, every time a vote is counted you publicise a new revision, everybody with an interest can download regularly and check for tampering?

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

I strongly disagree. This is a comment from someone who (I presume) is unaware of the advances in Proof-of-Stake blockchains, and other consensus protocols like the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus - one of the main things that sets a blockchain apart from a distributed database.

This consensus mechanism is what's important when something important (like an election) hinges on the blockchain being an accurate representation of state. This requires a Byzantine-fault-tolerant agreement. See https://medium.com/loom-network/understanding-blockchain-fun....

hwillis• 6 years ago

???

You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.

barbegal3• 6 years ago

Stellar operates on the basis of trust in a third party [1].

The jury is still out on proof of stake blockchains like Casper [2]

[1] https://stellar.stackexchange.com/questions/160/how-does-the...

[2]https://medium.com/@muneeb/peer-review-cbc-casper-30840a98c8...

DabbyDabberson• 6 years ago

Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus.

what about something like the Raft protocol?

cc23• 6 years ago

A database is a central point of failure. Nothing stopping a sysadmin or a hacker able to get shell access from just deleting a bunch of votes, or taking the whole system offline. A blockchain system over a p2p network is way more fault tolerant and available than a database.

Also, in a blockchain system, any person can connect a node to the network and can see all of the votes that are occurring/have occurred, and can somewhat verify the results of the election.

solarkraft2• 6 years ago

A blockchain is a database.

pgt5• 6 years ago

Maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if for each election we issued a ballot containing a unique, random, sequential prime number to every registered voter?

Then, when counting the votes for each candidate we display the running product of all the primes counted for that candidate as a "checksum", or "check product". This retains privacy while allowing individual voters to easily verify that their vote was counted by simply dividing their party's checksum by their prime ballot number and confirming that it is a factor of the check product. By displaying a running product of votes, you can also verify that your vote was not counted before you voted. Additionally, this prevents double counting because the "checksum" for N primes must match exactly N votes and no two candidates can share a factor. By issuing sequences of primes to certain regions, you can get some metrics by state.

Then you institute a rule that if some % of primes dispute that theirs was counted correctly, a recount is automatically triggered.

luckylion2• 6 years ago

It allows for verification not only by the voter but also by third parties, doesn't it? That would make it possibly to sell votes (with proof!) or threaten people with repercussions unless they vote a certain way.

compsciphd3• 6 years ago

what's a bigger threat. "selling votes" or unverifiable election.

i.e. we generally say election fraud is not a huge problem because its too easy to get caught.

if that's the case, one would think any vote buying scheme would be even easier to get caught.

pgt5• 6 years ago

This is only a risk if ballots are not issued privately.

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

If you see my above comment on a "Right to Vote" token system, which would abstract away the identity of any given vote, there is a solution for this:

Because the Right to Vote tokens and the accounts that they are voted with by are anonymous, no third-party knows which vote belongs to which person (except for arbitrary public-key strings). However, if a voter wants to check that their vote was counted, they can easily see that the token sent from their account was used to vote for a certain party.

Now, if a second layer of privacy and abstraction is needed, zero-knowledge proofs can offer that. This, however, is a completely different ball game.

Znafon3• 6 years ago

What is a unique, random, sequential prime and how do you actually vote?

pgt5• 6 years ago

Issue 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17... up to N for N registered voters. Mix them up and hand out randomly. So let's say you get 5 and I get 7.

To vote, you cast your prime for a candidate, thereby consuming it. No two candidates can share a prime, because their checksums will have a common factor, which is not allowed.

If we both vote for candidate A, his checkproduct is now 35.

If ballots 11, 13 and 17 vote for candidate B, his checkproduct is 2431. Because 2431/5 = 486.2 (non-integer), you can verify that your vote was not counted for B, but it was for A, because 35/5 = 7 (an integer). And because 2431 and 35 don't share any factors, no two votes were counted twice.

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

Not necessarily a dumb idea, but blockchains provide us an easier way to do something similar.

Every voter would be provided 1 (one) "Right to Vote" token after verifying their identity or receiving it by mail (as is the proposed solution from the USPS). This is arguably just as secure as mail-in voting.

Each voter would also have an "on-chain voter ID", which would just be an anonymous public-private keypair in possession of 1 "Right to Vote" token. This on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. All that's provisioned by the the election overseers is the right to vote with one account by using this token.

Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token, without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity".

Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly with UX, and then at a low level the hardware used (the general public is very easy to hack if you have nation-state power).

Ekaros4• 6 years ago

Receive by mail? At that point I already know that the system is fundamentally broken...

tudorhn• 6 years ago

This on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter

The government will generate these IDs and then mail them to people. Who’s stopping them from recording the mappings?

lalaland11253• 6 years ago

This setup seems mostly pointless to me. Instead of publishing the product, why not just list the primes themselves? Both should be roughly equivalent and just publishing the list of primes would be simpler. And then once you do that, why even use prime numbers? Just assign unique tokens to voters.

What exact security garantee are you trying to provide that wouldn't also be satisfied by just giving each voter a token and publishing the token lists?

pgt5• 6 years ago

It can be verified with a pencil and piece of paper and a calculator, so anybody can do it. As long as you agree about the number of sequential primes issued, you can calculate how many votes are still outstanding and keep voting booths open until 99% has voted. By issuing ranges of primes to states, you know where you have to keep booths open.

jsilence• 6 years ago

Why not simply print a receipt after voting with the vote printed verbatim and a digital token that allows the voter to easily check whether the vote has actually been counted correctly.

The token could be a hash of some relevant parameters that are easy to check and maybe digitally signed by the voting machine or whatever.

dpflan• 6 years ago

Indeed, a record of proof of the transaction instills more confidence in the system (i.e. votes aren't just in this "black box") and provides a redundancy in the case of issues with the electronic system.

fanf2• 6 years ago

The point of the secret ballot is to make it very hard to sell votes, because you can’t prove how you voted. (Vote by mail is not a secret ballot.)

jfk13• 6 years ago

This really doesn't help, because the average voter will have no understanding of what that "digital token" is or how it can be used to "check" anything. Are we imagining some kind of unique QR-code or similar, that I scan to get a confirmation my vote was recorded? That's pure black-box voodoo... why should I believe that there's any connection between that "check" and the official count?

unabst• 6 years ago

And couldn't you just have one flat log file as an append-only ledger of all the votes? Maybe add a time stamp and location stamp to each prime recorded for context.

Found this gem. https://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/millions/

1 million primes is about 2mb zipped. Even with additional information, a national election result of 130 million votes could fit on a CD.

The beauty of this is we have a completely transparent record that requires no unique software to view or test. No black boxes, and no magic beyond the magic of primes.

zeckalpha• 6 years ago

Private vote, guaranteed counting, no extra votes. Pick two. The system you’ve described only implements guaranteed counting.

ianhorn• 6 years ago

The number you're proposing has about 1.4 billion digits in it. It has more digits than just listing a number for everyone who votes and contains the same information.

RyJones• 6 years ago

VoteHere.net

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4771264

maxfan8• 6 years ago

There are a lot of comments here, but for anyone who’s looking for a well thought out implementation of publicly verifiable ballots, I suggest taking a look at Scantegrity [1]. Gotta love all the brilliant minds who worked (and implemented in the US!) it (David Chaum, Richard Carback, Jeremy Clark, Aleksander Essex, Stefan Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Emily Shen, and Alan T. Sherman)

[1] http://scantegrity.com/papers/ScantegrityII-EVT.pdf

Note: They published several papers on the implementation and design of the Scantegrity system. I just linked to one of them (the most recent I believe).

Yetanfou3• 6 years ago

Did they also invent a system which protects against voter coercion? If they did not, they might as well stop now since no matter how secure the voting system is its relevance falls down to zero if it is possible for the local gang leader to coerce voters to vote for 'his' candidate - "my man stands behind you to watch you vote for candidate X, if you so much as twitch your little girl gets whipped" (which works but doesn't scale that well) or "you show me proof of you voting for candidate X or we'll burn down your house" (which scales but depends on vote verifiability and as such is rather easily foiled).

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

This is a ridiculous argument, because it could just as well apply to mail-in voting as blockchain-based voting. I also think this fear is far overstated (do we have any stories of this happening in the US?) and the more pernicious forms of voter suppression and misinformation are downplayed.

If blockchain systems allow 90% of the populace to vote unencumbered, with a 5% inaccuracy rate (which is far higher than to be expected), that's still more democratic than only 70% voting.

EDIT: There are also ways to guard against voter coercion, for example by allowing "fake votes" to be cast, which if not cast with a certain memo in the transaction, will not be counted. This memo can be a PIN that the user is given as their "legitimate vote PIN", without which the vote would be invalid. When the user wants to appease their "mob boss", they would simply vote with another pin, and the vote would show as having gone through.

This is a surface-level solution, but the technical architecture that can be built to avoid voter coercion in a digital system is far greater than that with mail-in voting. With mail-in voting, your "mob boss" just forces you to tick a box, and put the sealed ballot in the nearest USPS drop box.

donaltroddyn2• 6 years ago

It's certainly not a ridiculous argument. Anonymity is a cornerstone of fair voting systems, and any system that allows votes to be deanonymised increases the risk of coercion.

The same type of risk applies to postal voting, although with less severity, as with postal voting there is only one opportunity to check the coerced vote. Blockchain based votes can be checked after the fact.

Still, for this reason, postal voting is rare, and most countries that allow it do so only for citizens living abroad or who cannot travel to a polling station die to injury or illness.

Countries like the UK and Australia that allow any eligible voter to do so by mail are rare.

xorcist4• 6 years ago

This is a ridiculous argument,

It is most certainly not. It is the reason voter secrecy in considered a cornerstone of a legitimate public vote.

There are whole organizations, like the OSCE Election Observation, who audit these sort of things internationally.

it could just as well apply to mail-in voting

It does, very much so. Every mail-in voting has to take this into account. Any introductory political science course will touch on these things. Commonly this is done by way of a method to override or revoke votes. A mail-in voting system would be problematic if it was the only way to vote. This is the most common objection to electronic voting systems, that it's hard for them to stand on their own.

Yetanfou3• 6 years ago

"blockchain systems" - which I notice you're invested in by virtue of leading a startup which in some way utilises blockchain technology - may be able to help in reducing the opportunities to cheat on the technology side. This is not the main problem when combating voter coercion, a problem which you noted also exists with mail-in voting. This is true and it is one of the reasons why mail-in voting (as compared to absentee ballots which have to be personally requested by the voter) is rife with problems. Technical solutions can only go so far, even that pin-code system with "fake votes" can be thwarted by using the same threat of force to obtain the "legitimate vote PIN". As far as I can see there are currently no reliable technical solutions to this problem and with that the personal vote at the voting station, using a ballot form and a pencil, is still the best solution.

Sometimes a low-tech solution is the best because it provides a low attack surface and is not easily abused at a massive scale. While there are still some opportunities to mess up things - lost ballot boxes, missing ballot forms, etc - these are easily detected and can be rectified.

For now, I vote for simplicity when it comes to casting my vote.

todaysAI• 6 years ago

Maybe they should maintain the postal boxes, have enough sorting machines, maintain the necessary manpower/processes, and remain independent enough to deliver the fucking mail.

ben509• 6 years ago

Even if they did all that, all the states would need reliable mailing lists. Oregon and Washington have been rigorously checking their lists precisely because of this problem, while other states don't need to do that if the onus is on the voter to show up at the correct poll.

It turns out that 17% of Nevada primary ballots had the wrong address.

If over 10% of votes are mailed to the wrong address, it would be a major crisis in a hotly contested election.

[1] https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/NV-2020-Primary-1P-1.p...

aoowii2• 6 years ago

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped.

Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure the open source code for the system is the same code actually being served on the system.

A lot of software has died by its own hubris by assuming their systems are secure and then a single 17 year old on 4chan finds a bug and ruins it all. You can't afford for that to happen in an election. Forget hackers, some skilled social engineering gets you the votes of thousands, but you cannot do that in person so easily.

I'm sure the problems have been discussed extensively but other niche problems include lack of availability for rural areas (which has been a huge problem even with paper voting). I think the only reliable voting system at scale is in person.

plankers• 6 years ago

You're not the only one.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

doublesCs2• 6 years ago

Our entire field is bad at what we do.

Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers.

Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon).

However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.

zelly2• 6 years ago

Aviation and elevators both run on software written by professioanl programmers so I'm not sure that comic makes a good point.

The problem with voting is that it's a distributed systems problem that requires coordination between not just many computers but people that cannot be controlled by code. An elevator can operate as a self-contained system without coordination with other systems. That's why it can be reliable while websites and apps cannot.

sebmellen25• 6 years ago

You can read a some of my comments in this thread addressing various concerns. That said, I would still agree. At least for the next 5-10 years (until we have Starlink-level internet and advances in cryptography/UX), electronic voting systems are not feasible.

The nice thing about blockchains is you can avoid DDoS by only allowing people who are "authorized" to "talk to" the blockchain. This can be done by ensuring that "Right to Vote" tokens are only sent to those who would otherwise be participating in the election, and ensuring they can only submit one vote, and one transaction, by sending that token to a specific burn account. This way, with 300 million voters, you would have a cap of 300 million votes. No one else could "submit" a vote, because they wouldn't have permission to on the blockchain network.

This is how blockchains avoid DDoS attacks already, but open and public blockchains have the problem that anyone can buy their native currencies, and with enough money can spam the network. With a "permissioned" system for elections, this risk would be mitigated.

EDIT: I would appreciate if the downvoters engaged with me or explained their reason for downvoting.

aoowii2• 6 years ago

It's worth working on to be sure. Another thing I think is worth working on is educating people on what blockchain actually is (which it seems you are doing). I think paper voting works primarily because people know and trust how the votes are counted and how they get to the counters, for the most part. But personally I barely understand transistors and flip flops let alone blockchain and that makes me slightly worried about how it might be possible to exploit them.

mulmen5• 6 years ago

No amount of cryptography can solve the problems of networked voting. It’s an exceptionally bad idea. Don’t do it.

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

My main criticism is that these systems don't address the actual challenges that elections face, and the introduction of networked technology likely introduces a lot of poorly-understood risks.

I'm a poll worker and a security researcher. Doing the former has really given me perspective on the latter. While a lot of blockchain voting proponents come up with all sorts of schemes to solve ballot-stuffing attacks, the reality is that we really don't care about that on the ground; it's just not a problem we encounter. The real problems come from more mundane things like power outages, being physically locked out of the polling place, poll worker exhaustion, out-of-date records used to verify eligiblity, and voters taking a bathroom break and subsequently walking away with their ballots unaccounted for.

Technology really doesn't solve any of that. In fact, introducing networked computers into elections only makes it less scrutable to the public. In my precinct, the first voter to show up gets to verify that the ballot bin is empty and that the scanner reports all zeroes for the count. Then they witness us putting security seals on the equipment and reporting the serial numbers to the county. Anyone from the voting public can understand this and do their part to keep us honest. Computers make this sort of simple check inaccessible to most people.

atoav3• 6 years ago

You are not the only one. However I don't think security is even a relevant concern, because there is one much more fundamental flaw in all electronic voting systems:

The goal of voting is to produce agreeable consent — so it doesn't really matter how you organise voting, as long as everybody afterwards can agree who won, who lost and by how much.

So phrased differently, one of the most important properties of any voting systems is that people afterwards can't just call the result into question. This can only be true if most people voting understand the mechanism, can verify it themselves and manipulation on big scales is hard.

This is why I think any electronic voting system is problematic. Even a total expert would have a hard time proving that one machine worked as it should on election day. If you then have some Autocrat who raises doubt about the election result whom do you trust? That expert who tells you that manipulation was mathematically impossible or that autocrat whose party you vote?

chrismeller• 6 years ago

And don't forget that the US operates on the Electoral College, which a shocking number of people don't even understand. Since each state has different rules about their EC delegates, popular vote does not necessarily equal winner...

Now try telling that to people when there's a big screen with "official" numbers that were all provided electronically an hour after polls closed...

enaaem• 6 years ago

Taiwan has the best way of counting votes. Ballot is hold in the air, the name is called out and someone in the back keeps the score. Everyone can see what is going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw

eloff5• 6 years ago

Wouldn't a blockchain voting system help here, if everyone can examine the time, place, and votes in the history, and see that all the block hashes match what's expected?

That gives much stronger guarantees than paper, and while the average Joe can't verify it himself, there would be three million programmers in the US alone who easily could.

Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that.

cheph4• 6 years ago

So phrased differently, one of the most important properties of any voting systems is that people afterwards can't just call the result into question.

This is a solved problem with in person voting, I would say that is one thing where South Africa has gotten it down quite well.

There is voter ID at the polls with voter registers to ensure only citizens can vote and nobody can vote twice, vote boxes are sealed and only unsealed with observers present from all parties and international observers, there is also observers at the polling stations from all parties, overall there is nothing to dispute and even in one of the most corrupt countries in the world election results are not disputed because everybody knows it would be absurd to dispute.

cheerlessbog• 6 years ago

This is part of the reason we still use plurality voting.

achow• 6 years ago

I guess both can be achieved - electronic voting along with a mechanism of having a verifiable 'agreeable consent'.

How electronic voting machines have improved India’s democracy

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect...

Excerpt:

..the study provides strong evidence that the introduction of EVMs led to (i) a significant decline in electoral fraud, (ii) strengthening the weaker and vulnerable sections of the society, and (iii) a more competitive electoral process.

Under the paper ballot system, polling booths would often be captured and ballot boxes would be stuffed, resulting in an unusually high voter turnout. EVMs helped tackle this risk by incorporating an important feature—registering only five votes per minute. Committing electoral fraud would require capturing polling booths for longer periods.

The success of the EVMs in India warranted a comprehensive audit mechanism to verify the votes cast. In 2013, the Election Commission of India formally incorporated Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines in the electoral systems. The VVPAT—leaving behind a paper trail of the vote cast—acts as an additional layer of verifiability and assurance in the electoral process. A paper record ensures that the vote has indeed gone to the intended candidate and is recorded as such.

jlokier6• 6 years ago

+1 for the wonderfully succinct "agreeable consent".

doublesCs2• 6 years ago

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

You're not the only one, most people on HN have the same opinion, and all these ideas have been extensively discussed here.

Slartie• 6 years ago

No, you are in good company. There are those that believe technology would eventually be the solution for any problem, and those that have lived through this phase already and sobered up, eventually coming to the conclusion that technology is not some magic dust able to solve any problem you throw it on, but just a tool like other tools, each of which has its purposes. All of them, not just modern technology, are fascinating, but none of them is magic.

mrweasel• 6 years ago

Add to that, that the average person have a right to understand how voting works and how their vote is counted.

Trying to make voting electronic, regardless of it being block chain or something else, ensures that only a few people are able to understand the system.

Right now it easy to verify that count was done correctly, in theory you could go do it your self. Computers will back voting a black box system where verification is going to be almost impossible for all but a few.

Pen and paper works, it simple, easy to understand and the process is transparent in all steps except for the few seconds where the voter is in the booth.

There’s a talk by PHK, where among other things, he goes into why you shouldn’t mess with elections : https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Predictable-Failures/

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

Trying to make voting electronic, regardless of it being block chain or something else, ensures that only a few people are able to understand the system.

This. Too many Internet/blockchain voting proponents tout their systems without appreciating the fact that people need to trust their elections. Trust comes from being open and scrutable. It's amazingly tonedeaf and elitist to insist that election systems need to be cloaked in cryptographic mumbo-jumbo to be trustworthy. It's also dangerous because the poll workers actually carrying out the election won't be able to tell when there's a failure.

djaque2• 6 years ago

No, at least in my circles nobody thinks electronic voting is a good idea.

I think Tom Scott has the best argument: you can't build a system that requires you to have a PhD in computer science to fully understand why you should trust it. Every day people need to have faith in voting and not just because a group of experts say they should.

NestedLoopGoBrr• 6 years ago

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.

nathias3• 6 years ago

that's a luddite argument, it can apply equally to everything that requires trust

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

I think what you're missing is:

Moving forward, large scale election rigging will be seen as a feature by those in power.

hpcjoe4• 6 years ago

I hate to say it, but it looks like this has been the case for a while. Look at the history of gerrymandering.

What I see is something that could potentially change the basis of trust for elections in a positive way. It won't be perfect, it won't be without its flaws. But it could significantly reduce multiple forms of fraud, and enfranchise more citizens to vote.

Again, I've always viewed blockchain as a solution in search of a problem. And this might ... might ... be a problem potentially solvable by an appropriately designed/implemented system.

slim• 6 years ago

voting != elections. everyone agrees that voting on elections is not wise. but direct vote for deliberation (for example on laws) works great

segfaultbuserr2• 6 years ago

No, you're not. This is the consensus in tech. Well, at least in the infosec community, this opinion is held by the majority. For example, Bruce Schneier is an advocate of paper ballot for 20 years.

* Voting Security (2004)

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2004/07/voting_secu...

* Securing Elections (2018)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...

* See also: xkcd #2030 - Voting Software

"They say they've fixed it with something called "blockchain."
"AAAAA!!! Whatever they sold you, don't touch it, bury it in the desert, wear gloves."

https://xkcd.com/2030/

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.

koheripbal4• 6 years ago

Neither of your two sources talk about crypto here at all.

Crypto would allow voters to follow their vote through tabulation, in private, and see exactly how it's being counted.

It has only two downsides...

1. People could prove who they voted for after the fact.

2. People who don't understand technology may not understand how it's so secure.

...but the reality is that these issues exist in the current system as well.

snarf21• 6 years ago

Exactly. The other thing the current system does is that it involves LOTS of people. The people counting a specific polling place may only count 1000 votes. They know their count. They can talk to the other counters at other locations. So if your state or area all of a sudden miraculously goes blue/red, you can know it instantly and have the paper to prove it. This is the beauty of the system. It can't be hacked at scale and you have a hard time inserting fake ballots because each location can triple check their reported district counts.

elcritch• 6 years ago

That’s a good point. Based on that idea, do you think large scale mail in ballots would have similar issues to an electronic system? Normally I don’t follow the news cycle, but this makes it seem large scale mail in ballots would be more readily corrupted at scale?

627467• 6 years ago

I agree with you.

1. Traditional paper ballots, manual counting are easy for voters to understand and increases trust in the system.

2. I also agree that traditional voting seems to increase the cost of substantial rigging (with multiple points of failure) compared to all electronic systems we have seen.

And yet: we all know the election rigging has always existed and will always exist and many times voters don't always understand how that is possible. I'm in a country where elections are considered by international standards to be fair: and yet, every election common people see reports and talk about rigging through various physical means (ie. Disappearing ballot boxes, stuffing ballot boxes, dead people voting). I agree that as a principle electronic voting seems to expose to rigging at lower cost and higher scale but I don't think it would be necessarily less trusted by the people.

thatcat• 6 years ago

The Spanish government tried to suppress the Catalan succession vote, but they used IPFS to host the voting system to prevent DDOS and DNS blocking to successfully cast votes anyway.

http://la3.org/~kilburn/blog/catalan-government-bypass-ipfs/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367531

diebeforei4857• 6 years ago

It's a generational thing.

Younger software engineers who grew up doing everything on their phones see this as something worth solving, because it would vastly improve access, end voter suppression, and people wouldn't have to take time off work to vote anymore. Universal mail-in ballots do address many of those points, but also have downsides (signature verification is tricky).

Older engineers on the other hand don't seem to want this to be solved.

Ericson23145• 6 years ago

I don't think that's fair. I'm young enough? And thing that given our current electoral systems and shoddy educations, paper voting is definitely better.

If everyone knowingly did some basic applied asymmetric key cryptography every day, and it was thought in grade school, that could change things.

If we voted far more often, so that the benefit of a single compromised vote was far less, that could change things.

I don't think first electrifying the vote, and then trying to bring about the above reforms, is a good strategy at all.

fwip2• 6 years ago

Signature verification only really matters if you have several ballots purporting to be from the same person.

Otherwise, they usually don't bother checking the signature.

How do you propose to do user authentication more securely on your phone? Keep in mind that several people may have access to this phone, including spouses and children.

hpcjoe4• 6 years ago

It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort

No, sadly, it's not [1][2][3]. As some of the texts note, the premise that fraud happens or not is highly politicized. People on one side believe it happens/happened. On the other side, they believe it to be impossible.

Though, curiously, those who believe it to be impossible also strongly believe in voter suppression, which would be a form of election fraud. See the Georgia US governor race from 2018 as an example of this dichotomy. Can't have suppression without fraud[4]. Can have fraud without suppression, as this would be one potential form of fraud. Suppression requires fraud. Arguments to the contrary aren't logical.

Right now the one I am most concerned with is the vote harvesting operations, which appear to be completely legal in California, despite the rather significant perception of impropriety that handing ones ballot to a non-election person has. I'd be much happier if all these people were non-partisan deputized election workers/officials, oath bound under pain of criminal code to serve the same function. Instead, we have a single party set of "volunteers" to collect votes, with a huge chain of control issue, that is apparently acceptable in one state.

Here in MI, I voted by "mail". I got my ballot, marked it, sealed and signed it, then dropped it off in the specific election drop box on the side of city hall. I would not ever hand it to a third party for any reason.

For blockchain, I think its been a solution in search of a problem. And I think that this might actually be a reasonable problem to solve, and this one might work.

For those worried about DDoS, this would simply require releasing ballots early, returning up to and including the official due date. By mail, electronic, in person via a phone app or similar. You can change your vote up to the end of election day. Only the final vote counts. No conditional ballots counted. Send official election people around to addresses that don't have votes on file starting a month before election day.

And it would (if designed/built correctly) enable chain of control, identity/citizen confirmation, etc. That is, it could provide better, more accurate, more complete, more engagement.

Or we can retain the mess we have now, with completely inconsistent voting across the states and territories, which is overtly suspect in a number of states, and in some ways, rigged.

This is a step in the right direction. It need not be perfect, and we need to take it.

[edit: fixed a mis-wording, and deleted a poorly worded sentence]

[1] https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_styl...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...

[3] https://www.kuow.org/stories/it-s-easy-to-commit-election-fr...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud

benrbray2• 6 years ago

the premise that fraud happens or not is highly politicized. People on one side believe it happens/happened. On the other side, they believe it to be impossible.
Though, curiously, those who believe it to be impossible also strongly believe in voter suppression, which would be a form of election fraud.... Can't have suppression without fraud[4]. Can have fraud without suppression, as this would be one potential form of fraud. Suppression requires fraud. Arguments to the contrary aren't logical.

No, you're missing the point. There is a difference between election fraud (the election itself meddled with by those who administer it) and voter fraud (whereby US or foreign citizens not involved in the administration of the election nevertheless interfere by submitting fraudulent ballots / hacking / etc).

The correct statement is "the premise that VOTER FRAUD happens or not is highly politicised". Everyone agrees there is fraud, we just disagree about which kind:

The Republican party frequently claims that voter fraud is common. Everyone else (including historians and cryptographers) claims that electoral fraud is a more common and widespread problem. In recent years we have seen:

* voter registration purges

* shutting down of polling places

* refusal to provide voting infrastructure to native american reservations and other "remote" places

* extreme gerrymandering

* sabotage of the USPS

* misinformation spread through social media (advertising false election dates, etc.)

* inability of voting box manufacturers to make guarantees about security and dodginess when it comes to conflicts of interest (like investments/ownership by politicians or foreign entities)

All of the above are examples of electoral fraud, not voter fraud.

miki123211• 6 years ago

There's a pretty easy way to solve this.

Give everyone a random ID/password combination (in an unmarked envelope, so no one knows who got what).

To vote, you connect to the system, either through a website or even an old, DTMF-based phone system for rular areas, and you cast your vote.

After voting ends, a list of all IDs and their votes is published. If an ID didn't vote, it's marked appropriately.

There should be lots of separate lists, perhaps one per street/district/village, depending on population density. That way, it would be hard to add fake IDs, while still maintaining voter anonymity.

The system is easy for anyone to understand, works on paper as well as electronically, doesn't require complicated cryptographic implementations which might contain bugs, and is much easier to reason about, write and audit.

The only drawback is the ability to prove who you voted for, perhaps with a photo, but all current mail-in-voting systems and some in-person-voting system suffer from that problem too, and bribing voters isn't really that much of a problem.

M2Ys4U4• 6 years ago

The only drawback is the ability to prove who you voted for,

That's pretty much the biggest problem to have in any election...

macNchz• 6 years ago

This is still vulnerable to a DoS attack as the parent suggested. Not terribly difficult for an individual to tie up all the phone lines or overload the web voting portal.

I also agree with the parent comment re hubris about this stuff: the incentives are immensely high for someone to compromise a system like this, and it only takes a small oversight to cause a huge disaster. Everyone gets a random password? Better hope whoever is generating them used a good RNG and a proper source of entropy...

M2Ys4U4• 6 years ago

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

No, you're not.

Electronic voting of any kind is a horrendously bad idea and it should be rejected at every possible opportunity because it cannot be secure.

ddingus4• 6 years ago

No, and I just dropped a comment. E-voting of any kind, unless it results in a public record of the vote, has basic trust issues. Voters cannot know their intent was reflected in the final tally.

Blockchain does not help with this.

rudolph9• 6 years ago

Keep in mind, network packets could be delivered by carrier pigeons.

I’m all for paper ballots and conventional signature based system based system but combine that with cryptographically secure techniques for distributed systems (on paper).

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

Why can we have online banking and Tesla autopilot and online medical prescriptions but not online voting?

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

The requirements aren't as strict for money as they are for civil elections. Financial transactions are frequent, so an error isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. All parties to a transaction know what everyone did; there's no requirement for strong privacy, so being able to roll things back is an achievable (and desirable) failsafe. Money also solves money problems, so you can insure transactions and mitigate losses.

Elections don't have those properties.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Political people play all sorts of games with elections physically. Don’t underestimate the lack of good faith that people will act with. But the system itself works.

The scary thing about electronic voting to me is the centralized nature. It needs to be decentralized to protect the overall system. The current scenario where a trusted entity (the USPS) is being de-legitimized needs to be factored in to protect democracy.

throwaway9364828• 6 years ago

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines. Just marking a box with a cross, sticking it in a box and then a load of volunteers physically counting the votes while representatives of the parties and anyone else who wants to wander in watches. Postal votes are treated the same and counted at the same time in the same place. The system literally couldn't be simpler or less corruptible. There is no need for anything more complicated because the system works and can be understood by a five year old.

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf

Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this manually.

staunch5• 6 years ago

This system relies on tens of millions of people trusting a few thousand people not to have been bribed. Seems entirely corruptible and you have no idea whether it has been corrupted or not. You're just left hoping it hasn't been.

A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. And could still be backed by a physical system as well, for added security.

Citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify.

Oddly, even most people that work in technology are incredibly pessimistic about solving technical problems.But anyone doubts that internet voting will be commonplace and incredibly secure in the future is a level beyond pessimistic. The only open questions are when and how.

hrktb2• 6 years ago

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

I think that’s an extreme position that would be hard to argue keeping, in particular in the current situation.

I see it the same way we deal with money: what is fundamentally different that makes us accept electronic money transfers as core part of our life but argue there’s no way electronic voting could be possible ? Saying current proposed solutions are not good is different from being against it on principle.

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

what is fundamentally different that makes us accept electronic money transfers as core part of our life but argue there’s no way electronic voting could be possible ?

Elections don't have those properties.

undersuit• 6 years ago

I'm against it for all your points and many more. We're stupid, electronic voting puts the onus on you to figure out so many things from why your operating system broke voting to why the apostrophe in your last name still breaks things.

Ekaros4• 6 years ago

What is wrong with in-person paper-ballots? They have worked for centuries. And continue to be the absolute best system from multiple criteria.

diffeomorphism2• 6 years ago

Covid? Waiting in long lines? Not having votes on a holiday like in civilized countries?

Swenrekcah3• 6 years ago

All of those are solvable (and solved in most western countries).

Re. Covid, it would be a simple solution to spread in person voting out a few days. It would be an inconvenience but no need to invent a new system.

kristopolous• 6 years ago

It's way too easy for the ruling party to put the thumb on the scale and That's what's actually been happening for centuries.

These days it's ID laws where certain IDs are accepted and others aren't based on who is likely to have what.

It's closing the places to acquire the ID in the areas that will vote against you

It's closing the polling stations, putting them in inconvenient locations, reducing the number of machines, putting only new people at the polling place, reducing the hours of operation, making the directions intentionally confusing ... there's many ways these are being manipulated.

Historically it was much worse. Ballots were the parties responsibilities and lots of shenanigans happened there, making the slots too small to fit some ballots, giving the counters a way to "prefer" which ones to count first and thus give a candidate momentum.

There's also lots of instances of "losing" ballots or finding stashes after the results were announced.

I mean really, it's not a panacea, it's susceptible to dishonesty and manipulation like any other human institution.

There's a number of great precautions other countries have done but the blinders of American exceptionalism strikes again and we're still stuck in the relative dark ages.

Gwypaas• 6 years ago

That's only issues because you choose them to be issues since there's no central constitutionally guaranteed process.

Most first-world countries simply require a polling location with certain number of booths per X people, require the maximum distance to one be Y kilometers which makes voting go swiftly. I've never waited in line to vote. Place elections on Sundays and ID's are already ubiquitous because you need them to function in modern societies. Like, I want to show my ID and then see my name be crossed of the list. It gives me the feeling of doing my part of upholding the integrity of the process.

The whole election is public, you can observe the polling locations and count. Just show up. This is mostly done by the political parties and watchdog groups.

Due to the size of the locations the first count is done a couple of hours after the election closes and the result is published the same evening.

We also simplified the process even more to allow you to vote up to 18 days advance of the election day at any place in the country. If you then decide to change your vote you can go to your polling location on the election day and the advance vote is thrown out.

brainzap• 6 years ago

It will all run on servers, where I am the administrator.

devin• 6 years ago

For those commenting, I suggest looking into ElectionGuard.

shrubble2• 6 years ago

I never understood why voting remains such an issue.

Why not have the credit card companies handle voting? The cost of a card with the chip is less than $2 isn't it?

The card is swiped into a reader, the ballot is displayed on screen, choices are made and confirmed, a laser printer prints out a paper ballot which is dropped into a secure box.

We would know within 1 hour of polls closing the accurate tally of every race.

violetyellow• 6 years ago

Suppose I'm a bad guy with Trump, I command the credit card company to issue 1 million fake cards with names which are passed away in last century. Ask my agents to sweep these cards and vote for me. How could you civilians prevent these things from happening?

diebeforei4857• 6 years ago

Vote by mail is also vulnerable to this.

shrubble2• 6 years ago

Voter rolls are maintained by the separate states.

naveen993• 6 years ago

anonymous, verifiable: chose one.

I would chose verifiable.

halfFact• 6 years ago

I'm with you. If someone votes for someone, they should also be held accountable for their Politicians actions.

naveen993• 6 years ago

Regarding sale of verifiable votes. Why not regulate the sale and tax it ?

nhumrich• 6 years ago

Why does a government service provider need to file a patent?

Fjolsvith3• 6 years ago

To prevent another entity from hoarding the solution?

jachell• 6 years ago

I thought we made it past the era of every company having a blockchain patent.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

Blockchain is important, but perhaps equally as important is the ability for every user of the system to be able to audit every other user, that is, vote/voter exact information transparency...

lixtra• 6 years ago

The caltech voting project has a nice collection if papers about electronic voting: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/

60secz• 6 years ago

Majority vote in a block chain isn't an election -- it's a 51% attack. Without a consistent economic incentive, too cheap for bad actors to act badly.

MrXOR• 6 years ago

For peoples looking for the truth about blockchain voting:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

atlgator• 6 years ago

It's the illusion of safety. There is no facility for identity verification baked into blockchain. You have integrity for the data allowed on the chain but if you let Russian hackers write to it, it undermines the whole thing. Personally I'd rather go with a PKI system that offers non-repudiation.

propogandist• 6 years ago

what Russian hackers?

zacharycohn• 6 years ago

Apt username for a comment like this.

mhh__9• 6 years ago

Russians are to active measures what God is to sin.

brundolf2• 6 years ago

Exactly. This is the entire problem with blockchain: it has absolutely nothing to say about the quality of the data entering the system, which is usually the hard part anyway. But it provides this false sense of security because most people have no idea what it actually means.

It's only useful when the entire problem space lives inside the blockchain. As soon as it has to reflect something in the real world, all bets are off.

the_snooze18• 6 years ago

It's pretty much par for the course for blockchain bullshit. They promise the world but aren't honest about the limitations of the tech. Yeah, you get data integrity assurance within the blockchain, but that says nothing about the accuracy of that data as it's coming in.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

There's already a few cryptotokens that allow voting on maintenance of said cryptotokens (or affiliated ones) would these not invalidate such a patent?

Edit:

On another side, what if we did use Blockchain to supplement votes in a different approach. I have not yet looked at how other Cryptotokens handle voting on policies but say we distribute to each state enough tokens per their legal citizen population, and voting places use a single token per voter, maybe a code is attached to their ballot (maybe a district code, only identifying their region?), this in turn pushes the vote into the blockchain for a permanent record, then when all the manual / machine counting is done we compare the blockchain results to see who screwed up, but it would also allow for a slightly more live view of voting in real-time.

diebeforei4857• 6 years ago

If you were creating a society on Mars, would you use a system of people lining up in-person to vote? Probably not.

Rigged elections have been a thing for a very long time. The shenanigans in Belarus is only the latest example.

Covid-19 will accelerate the inevitable. We're having a mail-in election this year, people will get comfortable voting from home and it's only a matter of time before people start asking why they can't just do it on their phone. I'm excited for blockchain voting.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

Wait until people realize there is no need for intermediate people in a lot of areas that can be eliminated with direct voting. Then you'll see a lot of social distress. Current rioting is nothing compared with what's coming

arp242• 6 years ago

The vote in Belarus was rigged by the government: "Lukashenko controls vote counting, [and abused] a vast security apparatus and a noisy state media machine unwavering in its support for him and contempt for his rivals". In other words: it required a vast conspiracy with many people cooperating in various ways to pull off. We've seen the same with rigged elections in Russia and some other places.

Compare this to an electronic system where a very small group of people (possibly even just one person) can potentially significantly skew the election results.

mhh__9• 6 years ago

Using the Belarus elections as an example here (government meddling) is like saying Litvinenko put the Po is his own tea

mgualt• 6 years ago

Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?

jacques_chester• 6 years ago

Patents take several years to be granted. This is an application, it was filed February 7, 2020.

ddingus4• 6 years ago

So, we are making all the votes a matter of public record?

It's either do that, or the voter is forced to blind trust whatever system is used to record their voter intent.

To consider this problem properly, think about the problem a blind voter has with a ballot. They cannot see the record of their vote, when it's made by a mark. With a punch card, they cannot see the candidate associated with their record either.

They have to trust whoever helps them cast their vote actually does cast it correctly. There is no chain of trust between voter intent and the record of vote cast.

Now, in the context of electronic voting, a person touches a screen gives an audio input, whatever. They have to trust the system does what they intend. There is no meaningful verification due to the fact that the system could tell them anything.

When a vote is cast on media with a mark, and that mark and media are used for the final tally, the voter knows their intent was recorded, and that intent could be used directly to determine the outcome of the election.

(other corruption can happen, and is outside the scope of this comment)

Without a public vote record, voters have no idea whether they can trust the election. Blockchain does not help with this problem, unless it's a public affair, everyone sees how everyone else voted.

Banking gets around this by always having redundancies. Books are kept in many locations and all must and can be reconciled.

Voting has no such redundancy, and due to that, electronic input has a basic trust problem not being discussed enough in my opinion.

ihm• 6 years ago

You can us zero knowledge proofs plus a blockchain to anonymize votes.

dQw4w9WgXcQ• 6 years ago

This seems to be the tech underneath Algorand. If the USPS created a "Vote Token" and it was truly anonymized, how would a central entity ensure that people were not double-voting etc?

ddingus4• 6 years ago

But you can't use those things to insure a voter intent is actually used for the tally.

Without publically identifiable votes, records like banking has for good reason, voter intent cannot be trusted to contribute to the final tally accurately.

graiz• 6 years ago

A distributed ledger approach is a very bad idea because a foreign country can launch a 51% attack on the ledger and has the resources to win and thus modify the ledger.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

You can have a blockchain without a distributed ledger.

anigbrowl• 6 years ago

If you already have working electronic voting (for the sake of argument) you don't need to elect representatives any more, you can just vote on issues directly and set quorums and thresholds. For that matter you don't really need ballots any more either, you can have the corpus of laws as a wiki and just edit it.

davidajackson• 6 years ago

Isn't the bigger issue here that someone can file a patent for something so blatantly obvious? Patents in software seem to do nothing good for innovation.

OliverGilan• 6 years ago

A lot of issues being brought up with electronic voting seem to me to be solvable via a blockchain technology like Ethereum.

Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine.

If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go.

Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key.

I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?

throwaway9364828• 6 years ago

Because it's utterly utterly unnecessary and can be solved by the very simple tick box, count ballot in public, let anyone watch or volunteer to do so system. The existing problems with the American system of dodgy ballots, hanging chads, OCR errors etc. are causes by too much technology. Get rid of it all and use a wholly manual system. Treat postal votes the same way and count them at the same time as other ballots.

solarkraft2• 6 years ago

Tom Scott: Why electronic voting is still a bad idea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

brundolf2• 6 years ago

There's an XKCD for this: https://xkcd.com/2030/

guenthert• 6 years ago

Does that mean they can now further de-prioritize mail delivery? I'm waiting for weeks on my EDD debit card. If only someone would have invented a way to transfer funds electronically ...

zelly2• 6 years ago

- Won't work. People will lose their private keys. Apparently the key is distributed to people on a piece of paper in the mail. That will get stolen--or claimed to be stolen. It will be a mess.

- What's the point of a blockchain here? Is USPS raising money with an ICO? The use of digital signatures is enough. By having a "distributed public ledger" now you open the possibility of getting Sybil attacked. But wait, you say, USPS has their own canoncial version of the chain that they can force everyone to rollback to in case of an attack--then what was the point of a blockchain? You could just have a website that shows a list of public keys and who they voted for. It would be totally auditable by anyone, just as a blockchain would be, without any of the security risks of a blockchain.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

How is this at all patentable? Can someone explain the line between new innovation and application of existing technology?

ycombonator• 6 years ago

I received two separate ballots on two different people who resided in this house in the past. What’s stopping me from filling both these ballots and mailing them. The point is unless and until the voter roll integrity is guaranteed there is always a possibility of fraud.

yalogin• 6 years ago

Why does the USPS have a group that thinks about blockchain? If it exists what is this group ?

detaro• 6 years ago

lots of enterprise-y companies and organizations get small groups to look at buzzword topics, and blockchain has been hyped for a bunch of postal-adjacent topics. Good chunk of the patent authors seem to be external consultants too... Couldn't find anything specific about in what context USPS specifically looked at that.

USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

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