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USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

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Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#131

Post by 627467 »

aoowii wrote: post #48

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…

I agree with you.

1. Traditional paper ballots, manual counting are easy for voters to understand and increases trust in the system.

2. I also agree that traditional voting seems to increase the cost of substantial rigging (with multiple points of failure) compared to all electronic systems we have seen.

And yet: we all know the election rigging has always existed and will always exist and many times voters don't always understand how that is possible. I'm in a country where elections are considered by international standards to be fair: and yet, every election common people see reports and talk about rigging through various physical means (ie. Disappearing ballot boxes, stuffing ballot boxes, dead people voting). I agree that as a principle electronic voting seems to expose to rigging at lower cost and higher scale but I don't think it would be necessarily less trusted by the people.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#132

Post by mrob »

NestedLoopGoBrr wrote: post #108
djaque wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at least in my circles nobody thinks electronic voting is a good idea. I think Tom Scott has the best argument: you can't build a system that requires you to have a PhD in computer science to fully understand why you should trust it. Every day people need to have faith in voting and not just because a group of experts say they should.

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.

I can watch an airplane fly and be confident that it's actually flying. I can watch election workers count and be confident that they're actually counting. I don't need to know why something works when I can personally observe it working.

But I can't observe the operation of an electronic voting system. All I can see is the result, and a fraudulent result looks very much like a legitimate result. I'm forced to understand it (which is likely impossible considering the complexity of modern hardware) or to trust people who have incentives to cheat me.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#133

Post by curryst »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #73
hwillis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.

You don't know my bitcoin wallet address unless I share it with you, and you wouldn't know my voting ID unless I shared it with you.

SSNs are probably the closest existing parallel. How many people in the US of voting age haven't had their SSN leaked yet? Obviously SSN is abused in the things it is used for (I.e. identification), but I don't see any indication voter IDs wouldn't be abused the same way.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#134

Post by jfk13 »

jsilence wrote: post #60
pgt wrote: post #27

Maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if for each election we issued a ballot containing a unique, random, sequential prime number to every registered voter? Then, when counting the votes for each candidate we display the running product of all the primes counted for that candidate as a "checksum", or "check product". This retains privacy while allowing individual voters to easily verify that their vote was counted by…

Why not simply print a receipt after voting with the vote printed verbatim and a digital token that allows the voter to easily check whether the vote has actually been counted correctly. The token could be a hash of some relevant parameters that are easy to check and maybe digitally signed by the voting machine or whatever.

This really doesn't help, because the average voter will have no understanding of what that "digital token" is or how it can be used to "check" anything. Are we imagining some kind of unique QR-code or similar, that I scan to get a confirmation my vote was recorded? That's pure black-box voodoo... why should I believe that there's any connection between that "check" and the official count?

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#135

Post by thatcat »

aoowii wrote: post #48

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…

The Spanish government tried to suppress the Catalan succession vote, but they used IPFS to host the voting system to prevent DDOS and DNS blocking to successfully cast votes anyway.

http://la3.org/~kilburn/blog/catalan-government-bypass-ipfs/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367531

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#137

Post by gruez »

NestedLoopGoBrr wrote: post #108
djaque wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at least in my circles nobody thinks electronic voting is a good idea. I think Tom Scott has the best argument: you can't build a system that requires you to have a PhD in computer science to fully understand why you should trust it. Every day people need to have faith in voting and not just because a group of experts say they should.

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.

OTOH you have people who don't know how vaccines work, don't trust doctors, and have opted not to get them, jeopardizing public health. If such people can exist, just imagine what would happen if there was a misinformation campaign targeting the losing side, with the aim of convincing that the e-voting election was rigged/flawed/broken, and that they should stage an insurrection to remove the current "illegitimate" government.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#138

Post by the_snooze »

sebmellen wrote: post #52
aoowii wrote: post #48

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…

You can read a some of my comments in this thread addressing various concerns. That said, I would still agree. At least for the next 5-10 years (until we have Starlink-level internet and advances in cryptography/UX), electronic voting systems are not feasible. The nice thing about blockchains is you can avoid DDoS by only allowing people who are "authorized" to "talk to" the blockchain. This can be done by ensuring t…

My main criticism is that these systems don't address the actual challenges that elections face, and the introduction of networked technology likely introduces a lot of poorly-understood risks.

I'm a poll worker and a security researcher. Doing the former has really given me perspective on the latter. While a lot of blockchain voting proponents come up with all sorts of schemes to solve ballot-stuffing attacks, the reality is that we really don't care about that on the ground; it's just not a problem we encounter. The real problems come from more mundane things like power outages, being physically locked out of the polling place, poll worker exhaustion, out-of-date records used to verify eligiblity, and voters taking a bathroom break and subsequently walking away with their ballots unaccounted for.

Technology really doesn't solve any of that. In fact, introducing networked computers into elections only makes it less scrutable to the public. In my precinct, the first voter to show up gets to verify that the ballot bin is empty and that the scanner reports all zeroes for the count. Then they witness us putting security seals on the equipment and reporting the serial numbers to the county. Anyone from the voting public can understand this and do their part to keep us honest. Computers make this sort of simple check inaccessible to most people.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#139

Post by cc23 »

barbegal wrote: post #20

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each…

A database is a central point of failure. Nothing stopping a sysadmin or a hacker able to get shell access from just deleting a bunch of votes, or taking the whole system offline. A blockchain system over a p2p network is way more fault tolerant and available than a database.

Also, in a blockchain system, any person can connect a node to the network and can see all of the votes that are occurring/have occurred, and can somewhat verify the results of the election.

Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

#140

Post by eloff »

atoav wrote: post #72
aoowii wrote: post #48

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…

You are not the only one. However I don't think security is even a relevant concern, because there is one much more fundamental flaw in all electronic voting systems: The goal of voting is to produce agreeable consent — so it doesn't really matter how you organise voting, as long as everybody afterwards can agree who won, who lost and by how much. So phrased differently, one of the most important properties of any vo…

Wouldn't a blockchain voting system help here, if everyone can examine the time, place, and votes in the history, and see that all the block hashes match what's expected?

That gives much stronger guarantees than paper, and while the average Joe can't verify it himself, there would be three million programmers in the US alone who easily could.

Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that.

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