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An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

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Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#51

Post by maemilius »

kaoD wrote: post #42

Honestly, a very naïve solution. I tried formalizing the protocol but there are so many inconsistencies. E.g. the ephemeral key is mentioned briefly... Who generates this key? Who encrypts the message? What's the purpose? Critique of the few parts that are clear: 1. It mentions a vote blockchain. Why blockchain? There's (apparently) no reason to have a chain of votes here. Even a spreadsheet would be fine. Buzzword a…

In regards to 2, for most Americans, it's probably a fairly trivial* matter to infer who they voted for. For a large number, almost their entire lives are digitized in some form or another. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a modern AI could deduce your voting preference just using your public data.

EDIT: *In retrospect, "trivial" is probably vastly understating the difficulty. However, I still don't think this is a "hard" problem.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#52

Post by castratikron »

delinka wrote: post #48
castratikron wrote: post #30

The main problem with digitally signing/encrypting a vote is that the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous. I like the idea of a county/precinct/district being the entity who signs the results of a vote. This would protect the anonymity of individual voters, since results are reported on a per county basis today anyways. And if a county is suspected of voter fraud, you could a…

You assume that a key pair is (publicly?) associated with an individual. I can generate a key pair, sign something (publishing the public part of the key, but not the fact that it was me owning it), then discard the key pair. How will you associate the public key to me?

What's stopping a single person from generating multiple keys?

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#53

Post by castratikron »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #36
castratikron wrote: post #30

The main problem with digitally signing/encrypting a vote is that the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous. I like the idea of a county/precinct/district being the entity who signs the results of a vote. This would protect the anonymity of individual voters, since results are reported on a per county basis today anyways. And if a county is suspected of voter fraud, you could a…

> the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous. How does this follow?

In order to verify a signature, you'd need to know the public key of the person who signed the vote. At least that's how I understand it.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#54

Post by kaoD »

maemilius wrote: post #51
kaoD wrote: post #42

Honestly, a very naïve solution. I tried formalizing the protocol but there are so many inconsistencies. E.g. the ephemeral key is mentioned briefly... Who generates this key? Who encrypts the message? What's the purpose? Critique of the few parts that are clear: 1. It mentions a vote blockchain. Why blockchain? There's (apparently) no reason to have a chain of votes here. Even a spreadsheet would be fine. Buzzword a…

In regards to 2, for most Americans, it's probably a fairly trivial* matter to infer who they voted for. For a large number, almost their entire lives are digitized in some form or another. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a modern AI could deduce your voting preference just using your public data. EDIT: *In retrospect, "trivial" is probably vastly understating the difficulty. However, I still don't think this is a…

That's a personal choice and, even then, you really can't be sure. Someone might be a Dem in public and vote Rep in the privacy of the booth. I'm sure this happens a lot more than you think.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#55

Post by Findeton »

kaoD wrote: post #42

Honestly, a very naïve solution. I tried formalizing the protocol but there are so many inconsistencies. E.g. the ephemeral key is mentioned briefly... Who generates this key? Who encrypts the message? What's the purpose? Critique of the few parts that are clear: 1. It mentions a vote blockchain. Why blockchain? There's (apparently) no reason to have a chain of votes here. Even a spreadsheet would be fine. Buzzword a…

Yep, the blockchain is uncalled for. I work at an electronic voting company and sometimes we get clients that want to add the blockchain for the system. We patiently explain it to them that yeah, the blockchain has some interesting properties that can be used but that it's not really necessary and it would only be used by a small piece of the voting system...

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#56

Post by Findeton »

castratikron wrote: post #53
tiglionabbit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous. How does this follow?

In order to verify a signature, you'd need to know the public key of the person who signed the vote. At least that's how I understand it.

The contents of the ballot can still remain anonymous.

You create a plaintext ballot, then you encrypt the ballot with the election authorities' keys, then you sign your encrypted ballot with your own private key (then you send the ballot to the server).

You are signing a ballot that is already encrypted.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#57

Post by nickff »

iainmerrick wrote: post #50
nickff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little evidence of voter fraud because nobody who wants to look for fraud is able to do so (due to many measures put in place to keep voting private, make it easy, and keep it simple), and as Feynman said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Evidence of fraud does exist, but it is difficult to discern whether it is the tip of an iceberg, or just an ice-cube.[1][2] Given the fact that presidentia…

[1] is from 1948, but [2] is definitely worth looking into. 83 ballots isn't widespread fraud unless it's happening a lot, everywhere. Maybe it is! But it would require a massive and very disciplined conspiracy working at many levels across the country. To me, the burden of proof lies on anyone claiming there is such a conspiracy. (Trump complained of a vote-rigging conspiracy, of course, but unsurprisingly he shut u…

I am not saying there is a vast voter-fraud conspiracy, and those two links are not meant to be an exhaustive list; I included the Johnson link because it is so famous, and the more recent link to show that the phenomenon seems to persist. If there is widespread voter fraud, I would guess that it exists as a (large) number of relatively small operations, probably emanating from 'get-out-the-vote' campaigns.

I am not a 'team player' for any party, and take all allegations by candidates with a heaping mound of salt.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#58

Post by iainmerrick »

nickff wrote: post #57
iainmerrick wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] is from 1948, but [2] is definitely worth looking into. 83 ballots isn't widespread fraud unless it's happening a lot, everywhere. Maybe it is! But it would require a massive and very disciplined conspiracy working at many levels across the country. To me, the burden of proof lies on anyone claiming there is such a conspiracy. (Trump complained of a vote-rigging conspiracy, of course, but unsurprisingly he shut u…

I am not saying there is a vast voter-fraud conspiracy, and those two links are not meant to be an exhaustive list; I included the Johnson link because it is so famous, and the more recent link to show that the phenomenon seems to persist. If there is widespread voter fraud, I would guess that it exists as a (large) number of relatively small operations, probably emanating from 'get-out-the-vote' campaigns. I am not…

I didn't mean to imply you had an agenda, sorry! Trump is just the most recent example of someone making vote-rigging claims.

As people have commented elsewhere in this discussion, an online voting system would probably be more vulnerable to fraud, given what we know of the methods and capabilities of the NSA and other organisations.

I agree that there's probably petty fraud going on here and there but I don't see the need for sweeping and risky changes to try to fix it.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#59

Post by bn-usd-mistake »

Findeton wrote: post #56
castratikron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to verify a signature, you'd need to know the public key of the person who signed the vote. At least that's how I understand it.

The contents of the ballot can still remain anonymous. You create a plaintext ballot, then you encrypt the ballot with the election authorities' keys, then you sign your encrypted ballot with your own private key (then you send the ballot to the server). You are signing a ballot that is already encrypted.

Unless I misunderstood you, the government would know who I specifically voted for in your scheme? That would be a huge no-go!

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#60

Post by jedberg »

jjoonathan wrote: post #33
jedberg wrote: post #32

I made this comment on a related thread yesterday[0]: You don't need crypto. You just need a machine that prints out a human readable receipt that the voter can see but not alter, which then drops into a secure holding area on the machine. At the end of the day, you randomly select say 1% of all the machines and hand count all the ballots inside, making sure the counts and votes match. If they do, then you can be rea…

How does this accomplish goals #1 and #2 of TFA?

What do you mean? It meets all six goals:

- Be verifiable - you should be able to see your own vote.

You can view the print out of your vote before it drops into the secure box.

- Be auditable - anyone should be able to tally up the results of the election.

Anyone can count the paper ballots

- Be secure - it must not leak anyone's vote to anyone else.

It's on an unidentified piece of paper

- Be genuine - it should be cryptographically impossible to commit voter fraud.

Well, you have to rely on standard methods of preventing voter fraud, but since there have only been five cases of proven voter fraud in the history of US elections, it's not really a big deal

- Be tamper-proof - it must be impossible to forge results from the inside.

Since the paper is in the machine and verified by a human, you can't really tamper with it any more than you can tamper with paper ballots today, and since those or monitored by adversarial groups, it's basically impossible to tamper with them.

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