Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
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Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#2I was thinking the same thing. Glad someone is doing this, because the hope is obviously it'll massive increase the efforts anti-democratic individuals or orgs need to invest to determine the outcome of an election; which isn't all that high today.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#3Not sure what this solves. I'm a huge proponent of Bitcoin/Blockchain, but how is this a better solution than say, one centralized national database?
Blockchains are useful in situations where centralized trust can't be established or would be less valuable. If you can't trust the government that's running the election process, how would a blockchain solve that?
Too many blockchain proposals just boil down to building a slow, expensive to maintain database.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#4Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up with various exploits to at least disrupt an election under these systems. Once you give me all this shiny new attack surface I can:
- Hack the voting machines to just turn on the "duress" mode for everyone, or do it just in the precincts that tend to vote for my opponent
- Use my great new paper receipt to prove I have voted for candidate A and collect my bribe as if the paper receipt doesn't encode the candidate it's useless. I don't care to verify if my vote was counted if I can't verify that it was counted for my candidate
- Hack the voting machines to record candidates at random ignoring the key presses, turning the election into disarray
- Selectively deny network access at polling places to create longer queues at the sites where my opponent is stronger
I'm sure you can cause a riot or two pretty easily. The fact that paper is dumb and paper elections use extremely simple technology, math and process is a feature not a bug.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#5I was thinking the same thing. Glad someone is doing this, because the hope is obviously it'll massive increase the efforts anti-democratic individuals or orgs need to invest to determine the outcome of an election; which isn't all that high today.
u wot m8. How much money could a collective of billionaires apply to a 51% attack? A 49% attack? Cheaper or more expensive than lobbying?
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#6Looking at the "Voting Machine Security Specifications", it's a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day.
This means that you have to trust the:
* VPN
* OS
* Network stack
* Display and input drivers (HW and SW)
* SSD controller
* CPU
* CPU's "Management Engine" or equivalent
* Mainboard chipset
I don't say this lightly: the authors are dangerous fools. They're fools to think that this is secure enough for an election. And they're dangerous because someone in power might believe them.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#7I invented something like this myself that used a checksum based form of ensuring data can't be tampered with. The key point is that anyone can look up how it recorded THEIR vote without anyone else being able to. Uses a hash of social security number for that (plus other personal identifiers). Websites can be written to allow a simple form-based trivially simple gui that allows anyone to look up how their vote was recorded. There needs to be a way for people to post a 'protest' (saying vote was recorded wrong), and if there are statically enough disputes to change the outcome the election must be redone. But regardless blockchain or something using my checksum approach is the only solution. No paper chads or other technology will ever be trustworthy.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#8Not sure what this solves. I'm a huge proponent of Bitcoin/Blockchain, but how is this a better solution than say, one centralized national database? Blockchains are useful in situations where centralized trust can't be established or would be less valuable. If you can't trust the government that's running the election process, how would a blockchain solve that? Too many blockchain proposals just boil down to buildin…
Trust in the government is not a given. They must earn trust through public support, which is why propaganda and PR are such power government tools used to change what the public supports. With a blockchain, you don't have to trust the government at all, since it is public and very difficult to tamper with. If they do not comply with the outcome in the blockchain, the public outcry will cause severe upheaval. To not comply with less secure voting systems, they can just tamper with it to change the outcome.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#9I'm not sure about this specific approach. As other comments note, this is somewhat complex. That said there may be a few gem ideas.
- Did my vote get counted? (can you prove it)
- Did it get counted correctly? (can you prove it)
- Can a vote be both traceable to the voter and anonymous publicly?
The parallel to blockchain is simple. I get a "vote coin" that I can spend at the election. You can then see who has the most votes. The challenge to overcome in any block-chain approach is how to prevent votes from being bought and sold.
If done correctly you don't have to trust the hardware to trust the election. If done correctly we could vote by phone.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#10I'm not sure about this specific approach. As other comments note, this is somewhat complex. That said there may be a few gem ideas. - Did my vote get counted? (can you prove it) - Did it get counted correctly? (can you prove it) - Can a vote be both traceable to the voter and anonymous publicly? The parallel to blockchain is simple. I get a "vote coin" that I can spend at the election. You can then see who has the m…
the biggest problem isn't buying and selling votes, its distribution of the votecoin.
if you can get votea into the hands of legitimate voters, the rest falls into place.