Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

engineering.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 316 posts

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#291

Post by Spivak »

specialist wrote: post #268
zanny wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the answer. You should never trust any one given voting machine. But it is much, much harder to corrupt large consensus networks, and blockchain based voting lets you maintain pseudonymity and it lets you verify the results with whatever computer you want. Some neat features you can bake into a blockchain based voting protocol: * You can have temporary identifiers in the confirmation stage. IE, you cast your…

Please explain to my mother how this system would work. And should this system fail, or simply be faked, how would I know? PublicVotes' first claim is to be "fair". Fairness is a property of the form of election (eg approval voting vs first-past-the-post), not the voting system. I'll scan the docs, see if there's any merit, but right out of the gate the starting assumptions are way off base, so don't have much hope f…

> Please explain to my mother how this system would work.

Instead of casting your vote by giving it to a single person you give it to many different groups interested in keeping the election fair. These groups can be anyone -- advocacy groups, political parties, independent auditors, or local governments. They all receive your vote, verify that it's correct, and sign their name below your vote on a public ledger which can't be tampered with without everyone knowing.

Hell, you don't even really need a digital blockchain for this kind of system to work.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#292

Post by VT_Drew »

curried_haskell wrote: post #251
franciscojgo wrote: post #228

I am strongly against the view of the author. I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience. Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd. I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy.…

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable. With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vot…

>With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud.

We already have technology that, so far, is pretty much tamper proof that could easily be adapted for online voting. I would be highly skeptical/distrustful of any centralized voting system, but if there was a open ledger voting system that uses a blockchain, well I would be all for that as it would be extremely hard to tamper with, arguable harder to tamper with than with paper ballots.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#293

Post by ferentchak »

VT_Drew wrote: post #292
curried_haskell wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable. With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vot…

>With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud. We already have technology that, so far, is pretty much tamper proof that could easily be adapted for online voting. I would be highly skeptical/distrustful of any centralized voting system, but if there was a open ledger voting system that uses a…

I agree.

And a receipt that shows my vote was counted as part of the final results.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#294

Post by specialist »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #288
specialist wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People get away with this because their vote doesn't matter." Why doesn't voting matter? Gerrymandering? The money race? Duverger's Law? The electoral college?

Because your vote has essentially 0% chance of altering the outcome. Hence your expected cost from choosing wrongly is 0% x something = $0.

I asked why, not what.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#295

Post by notahacker »

ethbro wrote: post #253
curried_haskell wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable. With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vot…

I think you underestimate the sophistication needed to tamper with paper ballots. There's certainly a "boots on the ground" requirement for tampering, but the knowledge requirements are trivial compared to crypto attacks.

Knowledge isn't really going to be an issue for the parties most likely to try to swing elections, many of which are state-level actors.

The thing about the crudeness of methods used to tamper with paper ballots is that it's also similarly trivial for a bunch of volunteers including members of all different parties involved in the election to spot, and in many cases trivial to reverse.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#296

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

germanier wrote: post #279
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One issue is the cost and logistics of it all. In Sweden we therefore have three different elections on the same day. Campaigning tend to focus on the national election, thus the others gets a back seat and quality suffers. Also, I've helped some smaller parties with the ballot distribution. It's not a small task for a small party to ensure each an every polling place in the country has ballots. Just the physical log…

I have a question: Does every party has to supply a seperate piece of paper and the voter then chooses which piece of paper to put into the ballot box? What do voters do with the non-chosen ballots, i.e. how is the secrecy of the vote protected? The system I know from Germany is that there is one ballot per election and the voter puts a mark which party/candidate they choose with a pen on that.

Yes. Three actually, if you count the different elections. On the ballot is a list of names representing the party so you can vote for a particular candidate by marking the name.

Usually people pick a set of ballots for different parties to bring behind a screen where the choosen ballots are put in the envelope for the box. The non-choosen ones you can pocket to keep secret. Some people tend to leave them in the booth though.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#297

Post by eximius »

dlitz wrote: post #81
eximius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't bribe open source. I find it hard to believe that a modern identity infrastructure (which we don't have, admittedly) combined with basic cryptography can't get us where we need to be. We might not be able to cryptographically prove anonymity, but all it takes is trusting the government to anonymize the data correctly and make it secure in transport.

The problem is harder than it sounds when you're talking about something as high-value as a national election (especially in the US). Have you read "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?

Yes. And the recent paper on backdooring CPUs by adding individual transistors.

You have to make some higher level assumptions in practice or you won't get anywhere.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#298

Post by thecrow1213 »

blibble wrote: post #15
thecrow1213 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'm no subject expert so I can't critique this, but it sounds better than other online voting systems I've heard. I like the checks and balances in place too. Now I only skimmed this article, but I feel like most people who argue against online voting use arguments about how insecure it is that already apply to what's happening right now (voting software is a black box, can be hacked, etc etc, this also…

not scaling well is a security feature! it's a lot harder to steal and alter 5000 ballot papers than 5, which is not the case with electronic systems.

True, but not scaling well has its drawbacks in voter participation and data management, no?

Like the post above me said, isn't the risk of peoples votes getting switched OK as long as people can verify their vote value?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#299

Post by lern_too_spel »

frobozz wrote: post #138
pmontra wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italy here, it works in the same way. Parties have their watchers. I expect this to happen in every country, unless there is only one real party and the others are there just for the show. In every paper based system problems can arise outside the voting site: parties can buy votes but that's the same with internet voting. With the internet and computers an attacker has the benefit of changing a vote every 1,000, on…

The paper based system guards against vote buying through the guarantee of secrecy. I go into a booth on my own, make my mark(s) fold my paper, and put it in a locked box. No one but me knows how I voted. If I go in with someone else, the officials will take action. You can try to buy my vote, but I can just take your money and vote however I want. If I can vote from wherever I like, then someone can stand over my sh…

I already vote from wherever I like by mail.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#300

Post by badsock »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #284
badsock wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this thread are assuming we can just solve the security issue if we try hard enough. We can't. It would mean securing every single voter's computer, and that's preposterous. There is no consensus algorithm or blockchain that will work if the voter's computer or phone is compromised. To name just one avenue of attack: if you have control of the video output then you can swap the name of two candidates. That'…

Those statements are too strong for the evidence you provide. A trivial solution would be when you vote online you get texted a confirmation. If you don't respond to the confirmation you get a call. The confirmation gives you a candidate you voted for and a blockchain signature and an opportunity to report error.

Voting is secret, so your solution as described wouldn't work, but say you used a one-way hash to verify the vote.

It still wouldn't work in the case of someone voting from a compromised phone, because the confirmation can easily be altered.

So now you've got a system where you need to be in front of two separate devices in order to vote, which I find unlikely to be accepted as a solution because of the inconvenience. And even then, it just means that you need two different viruses. Or find an exploitable flaw in the confirmation system. If you've got control over the machinery (including people) that's running the algorithm, the game is over.

My evidence is that there's never been a widely used system that hasn't been compromised: military installations, nuclear power stations, ATMs, gambling machines.

How could you possibly expect voting to be more secure than all of that, considering that in the above examples they had complete control over the network and the devices, and were hugely motivated and well funded in their security efforts.

Voting is too important to be handed over to a group of people who say "trust us, this time we figured it out". And to take that huge risk for what, just to avoid paper ballots?

Post reply on HN