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They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

theguardian.com

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Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#21

Post by jammygit »

joshfraser wrote: post #14
rectang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.

I suppose every election they could randomly distribute voter ids that are unique to that election? Ie, pull an I'd from a hat at the polling station then use it and keep it for verification?

Edit: undo auto'correct'

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#22

Post by joshfraser »

jammygit wrote: post #7
mi100hael wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting is one of the very few use-cases I can think of where Blockchain would actually be a valuable and differentiating addition.

Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions

Really we're talking about public key encryption. In an ideal scenario, every voter would have a public and a private key. The government would have a list of public keys to determine who is eligible to vote. Each voter would hold their own private keys. Each vote is signed with their private key and then published to an immutable ledger that everyone can audit.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#23

Post by leereeves »

nameless912 wrote: post #16
jammygit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions

Herein lies the rub with blockchain systems. If they're public, they're attackable, and if they're private, they're slower, more power hungry, and less flexible than a plain old database. It's not a dumb question, but blockchain doesn't provide good answers :)

I'm no fan of the blockchain, but this may be in the middle ground where blockchain makes sense: multiple independent trusted-but-not-completely parties verifying each other's actions.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#24

Post by rectang »

joshfraser wrote: post #14
rectang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.

I don't have such faith in blockchain anonymity. Data will leak.

See the paper "Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers" which talks about using timing based reconciliation, relationships between wallets, and superficial metadata within Bitcoin to deanonymize human traffickers:

http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sysnet/miscpapers/backcoin-kdd17....

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#25

Post by orev »

joshfraser wrote: post #4

It would be a lot easier to trust an electronic voting system if it was open-source, open-hardware, and votes were recorded on a public blockchain.

It would bring up extra risks as the machines would most likely then need to be connected to the Internet to be able to participate in the blockchain network.

Otherwise the reason we don’t have that is because there’s no money in it. Maybe if we allow the voting machines to also mine cryptocurrency when sitting idle...

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#27

Post by joshfraser »

forgotmypw3 wrote: post #13
jammygit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions

I don't think blockchain necessarily means anyone being able to make blocks.

Distributed control is still useful. It makes it incredibly expensive to try and tamper with the results.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#28

Post by mcintyre1994 »

joshfraser wrote: post #14
rectang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.

> But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system.

This has the same problem. Didn't waive your right to privacy and provably vote for the right candidate - you're fired (or worse). That's why taking photos of a ballot isn't allowed, you can't have any way to show who you voted for.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#29

Post by leereeves »

jammygit wrote: post #7
mi100hael wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting is one of the very few use-cases I can think of where Blockchain would actually be a valuable and differentiating addition.

Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions

A 51% attack would look like one source submitting a blockchain that's different from everyone else's, and effectively saying "my chain is longer so use it instead". Very noticeable, even if it might end up needing to be sorted out by courts instead of computers.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#30

Post by gcb0 »

orev wrote: post #9
rectang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

The votes can be public but that doesn’t mean the data needs to include information that identifies the voter.

then what's the point? can you list a single use case that would make sense with this idea?
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