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Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#21

Post by codedokode »

Mindless2112 wrote: post #14
codedokode wrote: post #7

I don't understand how counting verification is achieved. Let's say that election officials release a list of hashed votes, so that you can verify that your vote has been counted and included into results. But how can you check that all other votes in the list are the votes from real people and not arbitrarily added by sysadmin to get the expected result? Does anyone know how such things are implemented? I have read…

Who voted is public record (depending on your state [1]), so the numbers should add up. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-v...

Also, there is another scenario. Let's say the rules allow to change the vote later. A voter votes for candidate X and gets a link that allows to verify that the vote is recorded. But several hours later the server software re-votes for candidate Y. If the voter bothers to check results after election, they will find that their vote was altered. But the voter has no proof that they didn't vote for candidate Y, and election officials have server logs that prove that the voter has voted two times. So probably the voter is just lying because they don't want to accept the fact that candidate Y is supported by 99% of population.

And one more scenario: before closing the elections, officials can make a list of people who didn't vote and vote for them. If they didn't vote they probably don't care about elections and won't find out that someone voted for them.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#22

Post by dao- »

codedokode wrote: post #19

I thought about some advantages of paper voting compared to electronic: you can spoil the ballot, for example, if you don't like any of candidates and there is no option titled "Against all". In electronic elections, you cannot do that.

You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#23

Post by TheTrueTDF »

dao- wrote: post #22
codedokode wrote: post #19

I thought about some advantages of paper voting compared to electronic: you can spoil the ballot, for example, if you don't like any of candidates and there is no option titled "Against all". In electronic elections, you cannot do that.

You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.

It's a lot less fun though

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#25

Post by dwg »

YokoZar wrote: post #17
nostrebored wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can ask to verify.

Imagine I ask the voting machine to give me 100 sealed envelopes with "Alice" written in them and 100 sealed envelopes with "Bob" written in them. I open and destroy 199 of them, verify that Alice votes are Alice votes and Bob votes are Bob votes. I then walk out of the voting booth with a sealed Alice envelope, then deposit it into the ballot box. That's the "verifiable" step in here. The only way for you to know wh…

The post states:

> The combination of the tracker – which allows individual voters to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded – and the verifier – which allows anyone to verify that the recorded votes have been accurately counted – enables full “end-to-end verification” of the correctness of election results.

I understood this to mean that I am able to use the tracker to verify that my vote was cast for a particular candidate.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#26

Post by crispinb »

dao- wrote: post #22
codedokode wrote: post #19

I thought about some advantages of paper voting compared to electronic: you can spoil the ballot, for example, if you don't like any of candidates and there is no option titled "Against all". In electronic elections, you cannot do that.

You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.

Not legally here (Aus) - we have compulsory voting.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#27

Post by NeedMoreTea »

dao- wrote: post #22
codedokode wrote: post #19

I thought about some advantages of paper voting compared to electronic: you can spoil the ballot, for example, if you don't like any of candidates and there is no option titled "Against all". In electronic elections, you cannot do that.

You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.

Not always - spoiled ballots can sometimes count, or indicate growing dissent in society. Not voting can achieve neither.

Here's a case from last week of a spoiled ballot giving someone a majority of one: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/03/ballot-pape...

Was that the result the voter intended? Probably not, but who knows? :)

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#28

Post by YokoZar »

freshm087 wrote: post #18

It certainly has nothing to do with democracy, and intended to solve exactly one problem: Microsoft's need to increase revenue through sweet gov't funded contracts. Let's not be fooled by opensourced code, once the idea is sold to politicians, and media, someone should be contracted to implement this useless staff. And who's this going to be? Not hard to guess.

While I appreciate the cynicism, I'm not seeing how an open schema for tamper-evident verifiable voting machines could be anything other than positive.

It's worth noting that Microsoft has discouraged the use of embedded Windows on voting machines in the past: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2680658/gates-undaunted-by...

> “We ourselves are not going after the e-voting market or the nuclear reactor control market,” Gates said.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#29

Post by dao- »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #27
dao- wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.

Not always - spoiled ballots can sometimes count, or indicate growing dissent in society. Not voting can achieve neither. Here's a case from last week of a spoiled ballot giving someone a majority of one: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/03/ballot-pape... Was that the result the voter intended? Probably not, but who knows? :)

I don't understand your example. That ballot paper was counted as a Tory vote, i.e. not as spoiled.
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