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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

#151

Post by ianhorn »

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…

The number you're proposing has about 1.4 billion digits in it. It has more digits than just listing a number for everyone who votes and contains the same information.

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

#152

Post by Ericson2314 »

jadyoyster wrote: post #112
Beldin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great way to elect the one who buys the most votes. If you want to avoid such shenanigans, you'll need to enforce voter privacy.

The vote is private but the counting is public.

To be clear, they are calling out the number that indexes the papers, not a name of a person or a name of a candidate. 一號, 二號, 三號….

正 is the tally mark https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A3

I have like a 1-2 year old's level of Mandarin at this point, sigh, but I don't think there is a detail I'm missing once the process gets going. This is a good, accessible voting system.

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

#153

Post by hpcjoe »

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…

> It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort

No, sadly, it's not [1][2][3]. As some of the texts note, the premise that fraud happens or not is highly politicized. People on one side believe it happens/happened. On the other side, they believe it to be impossible.

Though, curiously, those who believe it to be impossible also strongly believe in voter suppression, which would be a form of election fraud. See the Georgia US governor race from 2018 as an example of this dichotomy. Can't have suppression without fraud[4]. Can have fraud without suppression, as this would be one potential form of fraud. Suppression requires fraud. Arguments to the contrary aren't logical.

Right now the one I am most concerned with is the vote harvesting operations, which appear to be completely legal in California, despite the rather significant perception of impropriety that handing ones ballot to a non-election person has. I'd be much happier if all these people were non-partisan deputized election workers/officials, oath bound under pain of criminal code to serve the same function. Instead, we have a single party set of "volunteers" to collect votes, with a huge chain of control issue, that is apparently acceptable in one state.

Here in MI, I voted by "mail". I got my ballot, marked it, sealed and signed it, then dropped it off in the specific election drop box on the side of city hall. I would not ever hand it to a third party for any reason.

For blockchain, I think its been a solution in search of a problem. And I think that this might actually be a reasonable problem to solve, and this one might work.

For those worried about DDoS, this would simply require releasing ballots early, returning up to and including the official due date. By mail, electronic, in person via a phone app or similar. You can change your vote up to the end of election day. Only the final vote counts. No conditional ballots counted. Send official election people around to addresses that don't have votes on file starting a month before election day.

And it would (if designed/built correctly) enable chain of control, identity/citizen confirmation, etc. That is, it could provide better, more accurate, more complete, more engagement.

Or we can retain the mess we have now, with completely inconsistent voting across the states and territories, which is overtly suspect in a number of states, and in some ways, rigged.

This is a step in the right direction. It need not be perfect, and we need to take it.

[edit: fixed a mis-wording, and deleted a poorly worded sentence]

[1] https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_styl...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...

[3] https://www.kuow.org/stories/it-s-easy-to-commit-election-fr...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud

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

#154

Post by the_snooze »

eloff wrote: post #140
atoav wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auth…

>I have to trust the authorities who did that.

Poll workers who do the count aren't "authorities" who lord over us. They are us. I volunteer to be a poll worker. You can too. Anyone who's an eligible voter can be part of the counting process and see how it's done. In my precinct, it's exactly what people see when they vote: they feed the machine their completed ballots and the machine spits out the count at the end of the night. If there's a problem, all the ballots are kept in sealed boxes and can be re-tallied independent of the scanner software/hardware.

If you think there's monkey business going on in your precinct, you're free to participate in the process and verify it for yourself.

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

#155

Post by dnpp123 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #142
eloff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auth…

The average Joe doesn't want the nerds to pick the president. Also, don't forget it's a secret ballot, and we do not have any good database of people with public keys in this country. What the hell am I supposed to make of a ledger with 100s of million anonymous public keys? Surely I cannot claim that relates 1-1 with the choices of real people.

I'm definitely opposed to 'electronic' voting, but the problem you are describing is easily solvable with asymmetric cryptography.

You'd have your private key on your 'voting card' (unsure how you call it in the US) with some pw and the machine would just scan it, ask your password. You just need the proof that someone having a private key associated with a public key on a public record has signed, not necessarily know to which public key it is associated.

But there would be so much problems with such a system that I would'nt even know where to start..

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

#156

Post by BurningFrog »

eloff wrote: post #140
atoav wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auth…

One very important thing most people forget:

If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop.

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

The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the counting process. You can't check your vote, but you can control all the votes.

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

#157

Post by koheripbal »

the_snooze wrote: post #154
eloff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auth…

>I have to trust the authorities who did that. Poll workers who do the count aren't "authorities" who lord over us. They are us. I volunteer to be a poll worker. You can too. Anyone who's an eligible voter can be part of the counting process and see how it's done. In my precinct, it's exactly what people see when they vote: they feed the machine their completed ballots and the machine spits out the count at the end o…

The number of people actually tabulating the results is still very very small - especially in key swing state districts.

You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.

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

#158

Post by miki123211 »

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…

There's a pretty easy way to solve this.

Give everyone a random ID/password combination (in an unmarked envelope, so no one knows who got what).

To vote, you connect to the system, either through a website or even an old, DTMF-based phone system for rular areas, and you cast your vote.

After voting ends, a list of all IDs and their votes is published. If an ID didn't vote, it's marked appropriately.

There should be lots of separate lists, perhaps one per street/district/village, depending on population density. That way, it would be hard to add fake IDs, while still maintaining voter anonymity.

The system is easy for anyone to understand, works on paper as well as electronically, doesn't require complicated cryptographic implementations which might contain bugs, and is much easier to reason about, write and audit.

The only drawback is the ability to prove who you voted for, perhaps with a photo, but all current mail-in-voting systems and some in-person-voting system suffer from that problem too, and bribing voters isn't really that much of a problem.

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

#159

Post by Ericson2314 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #147
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…

It's a generational thing. Younger software engineers who grew up doing everything on their phones see this as something worth solving, because it would vastly improve access, end voter suppression, and people wouldn't have to take time off work to vote anymore. Universal mail-in ballots do address many of those points, but also have downsides (signature verification is tricky). Older engineers on the other hand don'…

I don't think that's fair. I'm young enough? And thing that given our current electoral systems and shoddy educations, paper voting is definitely better.

If everyone knowingly did some basic applied asymmetric key cryptography every day, and it was thought in grade school, that could change things.

If we voted far more often, so that the benefit of a single compromised vote was far less, that could change things.

I don't think first electrifying the vote, and then trying to bring about the above reforms, is a good strategy at all.

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

#160

Post by koheripbal »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #127
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…

No, you're not. This is the consensus in tech. Well, at least in the infosec community, this opinion is held by the majority. For example, Bruce Schneier is an advocate of paper ballot for 20 years. * Voting Security (2004) https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2004/07/voting_secu... * Securing Elections (2018) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec... * See also: xkcd #2030 - Voting Software…

Neither of your two sources talk about crypto here at all.

Crypto would allow voters to follow their vote through tabulation, in private, and see exactly how it's being counted.

It has only two downsides...

1. People could prove who they voted for after the fact.

2. People who don't understand technology may not understand how it's so secure.

...but the reality is that these issues exist in the current system as well.

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