If you want to protect elections, USE PEN AND PAPER:
https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...
Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
81–90 of 177 posts
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#82I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…
Paper ballots are vulnerable to systemic voter suppression of the kind that’s hard to eliminate. Voter ID laws. Complicated ballots. Overloaded polling stations. Worst, all these weaknesses are difficult to eliminate because they are both difficult to sincerely debate and difficult to generate the public interest necessary to generate enough activism. Electronic voting can reduce the friction enough to where we can a…
These are mostly solved problems in all western nations (except for the US). E.g. I am Austrian living in Germany and I vote by mail since a decade.
Mail voting has the downside that it invites the kind of problems where some guy tricks elderly people into giving them their vote etc. But all in all it works quite well.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
If John Doe is listed as having voted, but is fake, how would you know he's fake?
You will typically get voter registration ID, just like in paper votes so you should be able to trace. The only thing different in electronic voting is that you sign vote with your private key which becomes your signature. So in theory, whatever can you do by receiving signed paper from someone, you can also do by encrypted content from someone.
> You will typically get voter registration ID, just like in paper votes so you should be able to trace. The only thing different in electronic voting is that you sign vote with your private key which becomes your signature. So in theory, whatever can you do by receiving signed paper from someone, you can also do by encrypted content from someone.
Either you're responding to the wrong comment or I'm failing to see how this is at all relevant to what I asked. How does tracing your own vote tell you if John Doe was fake?
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#84I 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…
I believe it is possible with homomorphic encryption (one of the few things that it can actually do). The maths is complicated though!
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#85I don't think it's desirable to let individual voters verify that their votes were counted. That means that the privacy of your vote can be compromised under duress a long time after the election.
Paper and pen, such a beautiful straightforward system, sacrificed in the altar of unnecessary use of technology.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#86I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…
Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem.
Just so the results of voting can be displayed on TV a bit earlier, we are supposed to accept substantial risks to democracy posed by blatantly insecure endpoints, blatantly insecure company infrastructure, insecure network communications and devices (routers, etc.), private companies that often have a track record of insecure and sloppy programming, voting machines that have been shown to be hackable easily (people from CCC and similar groups do that routinely when they get hold of a machine), voting program code that has been improperly audited and/or cannot be verified by the public, flawed patching mechanisms, flawed and insecure operating systems of voting machines, and on and so forth. The list of flaws of electronic voting systems is nearly endless, and, what's worse, there is no mathematical proof that the encryption used in those systems cannot be broken. (There are lots of proofs in cryptography, but almost all of them are based on very strong idealizing assumptions. In the end, only OTPs are provably secure. We do not even have a proof that P!=NP yet.)
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#87I don't think it's desirable to let individual voters verify that their votes were counted. That means that the privacy of your vote can be compromised under duress a long time after the election. Paper and pen, such a beautiful straightforward system, sacrificed in the altar of unnecessary use of technology.
I was surprised when I read that as well but reading further my impression was that you can confirm the contents of the ballot only while voting and then afterwards you only get access to a message along the lines of "Yes, vote a678b234 was correctly counted" or a message saying otherwise but not the contents of the ballot.
(which, while more secure, is also slightly less useful)
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but I don't think we should glamorize old-style paper voting either. Yes, it is easier for an observer to spot that something fishy is going on, but it is also easy for authorities to dismiss it as insubstantial. Someone obstructed your view of the ballot box for a few seconds? Sorry, that was an accident. Police evicted you from the poll station? Better behave yourself next time. You saw a blatant incident of…
> most fraud occured at the local level If it was something that was done at local level, not in conspiracy with central government, then why the investigations in cases of election fraud are so ineffective, and even if the case gets to the court, it typically ends with just a fine? If the central government didn't have relation to the fraud, they would prefer to punish local officials, yet they try to avoid doing it…
> If it was something that was done at local level, not in conspiracy with central government, then why the investigations in cases of election fraud are so ineffective, and even if the case gets to the court, it typically ends with just a fine? If the central government didn't have relation to the fraud, they would prefer to punish local officials, yet they try to avoid doing it. Instead, they warn heads of regions that the results of election in their region might affect their evaluation.
Maybe I misunderstood your phrasing but that's precisely what enables large-scale fraud. High-ranking officials can maintain plausible deniability by outsourcing fraud to the local level and doing nothing overt themselves. If low-level officials are caught, they suffer token punishment because some semblance of rule of law must be maintained (but punishment cannot be too strict because they were doing what they were supposed to do).
> Regarding things you have described, they are possible with electronic voting as well. Hashes not matching? You probably made a mistake, verify again, our experts say that everything is correct.
Right, but if you have evidence that say 10% of votes are tainted, it is something worth fighting for and going to the streets for. Whereas if all you have is a recording of a handful of ballots thrown into a box at some poll station in rural Yakutia, well who cares about a few 100s of ballots? You can try to string a few of these videos together to provoke an emotional reaction but it will subside quickly as public attention will be redirected to the next outrage du jour.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#89I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…
Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem. Just so the results of voting can be displayed on TV a bit earlier, we are supposed to accept substantial risks to democracy posed by blatantly insecure endpoints, blatantly insecure company infrastructure, insecure network communications and devices (routers, etc.), private companies that often have a track record of insecure and sloppy programmin…
> Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem.
That is incorrect. Voting is a feedback loop for the will of the voters. The slower the process is, the less representative it is. The fidelity of the loop is paramount, but the issue remains.
EDIT: do the downvoters understand that there is setup involved in a paper process and getting results is not the end of the feedback loop (not race)? SMH
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem. Just so the results of voting can be displayed on TV a bit earlier, we are supposed to accept substantial risks to democracy posed by blatantly insecure endpoints, blatantly insecure company infrastructure, insecure network communications and devices (routers, etc.), private companies that often have a track record of insecure and sloppy programmin…
> Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem. That is incorrect. Voting is a feedback loop for the will of the voters. The slower the process is, the less representative it is. The fidelity of the loop is paramount, but the issue remains. EDIT: do the downvoters understand that there is setup involved in a paper process and getting results is not the end of the feedback loop (not race)? SMH
"The slower the process is, the less representative it is"
If we are talking about months perhaps, but as long as a result is known within a day or two (at most) I'm not sure it really makes that much difference.