I think there is more important problem to fix if we are talking about democratic election.
Programmer in video says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thcO_olHas&sns=fb
Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions.…
Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessari…
Voting by mail enables coercion and bribes.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#53Paper 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…
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions.…
your missing the point of representative democracy
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#54I'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…
My scheme tries to achieve all of that;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#55There are many weaknesses in this system. The first clause of Design Considerations, "Although elegant and (thus far) invincible," shows a lack of understanding of currently possible and prior blockchain attacks. This protocol allows voting any Voter ID multiple times. There is a significant window of time until one of the blocks containing the Voter ID/ballot ID Hash is added to the block chain. During this time, al…
I've got an MPC based proposal;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#56My blockchain-based voting proposal: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.10
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#57I 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 r…
Any system that allows someone to confirm their vote is a system that allows people to be forced to vote for someone.
Depends on how the verification is done. If it is verifiably derived from your raw vote, then yes.
But if it's is tied to the process of voting such that it doesn't reveal the contents but confirm it was recorded right, then it can work.
See 3-ballot, and also my suggested scheme;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#58Paper 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…
Voting machines are not a problem as long as they are note connected to the internet.
They are distributed, based on different standards and access to them rely on physical access plus 75% of them have a paper trail.
They are as secure as anything out there IMO even if the boxes can be easily hacked.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#59I wish the cryptophiles would study how real world elections work before floating their ideas.
Votebook proposes using a blockchain as a tamper evident (immutable) audit log. Because voters sign-in chronologically, recording votes in order removes the secret ballot. Votebook's proposal is to group up multiple into "blocks" and randomize the order within a block.
Randomizing the order of the votes in an audit log would simulate the secure one-way hash of dropping your paper ballot into a ballot box.
Poll sites are "bursty". During rush hour, lots of voters, so blocks will span small time windows. During midday, blocks will be large.
1 - How large must these blocks be to guard the secret ballot? Using some differential privacy mojo might determine they have to be 100 votes. I'm skeptical. It's problem even today with poll sites and postal ballots. Situations like small precincts or low turnout. In which case, Votebook is adding complexity without any real world benefit.
2 - What happens with the vote data as blocks are being built? So now this system has plaintext data in memory awaiting processing. Oops, power outage. Oops, software bug.
3 - Votebook does not solve the problem of properly, accurately recording the ballot as the voter cast it.
4 - Votebook will be cryto-based, necessitating further outsourcing our elections to vendors.
5 - I would never be able to explain how Votebook works to my mother (Jane average).
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#60Paper 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…
A lot of non technical people often ask why we can't vote online. Part of our responsibility as computer scientists is to present them with the options.