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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

#181

Post by odyssey7 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #145
fanf2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the secret ballot is to make it very hard to sell votes, because you can’t prove how you voted. (Vote by mail is not a secret ballot.)

How is vote by mail not a secret ballot? I live in CA where we have had mail-in voting for some time. As far as I know, I don't have anyway to prove to someone that I voted a particular way.

A scenario where a family or workplace or other organization has everyone fill in their ballot in front of each other and then drop it off in the mail together.

“For convenience,” “to make sure everyone gets their vote in.”

The difference is there is no designated, guaranteed-private voting booth for the act of voting.

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

#182

Post by M2Ys4U »

sebmellen wrote: post #21
galkk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see, the problem is not that the vote can be altered, but that the vote can be bought and the fact that person voted in the right fashion could be verified by 3-rd party much more easily (screenshots/whatever). The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.

In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. Not sure this is really an argument against an electronic voting system. In fact, with a blockchain-based system, the vote could be held in "limbo" until the voter decides to cast it, or you could give the option of creating fake screenshots to deter anyone "buying votes". You can't do this with a…

>In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever.

And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it.

If that doesn't show that remote voting is vulnerable I don't know what does...

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

#183

Post by revnode »

beaner wrote: post #170
BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coun…

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

The overwhelming majority of the population doesn't have the capacity to understand what you wrote or why that is true. Even the majority of those who understand why it may be true, cannot say for certain that it is true without inspecting the codebase and its operation. That's a major problem.

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

#184

Post by Touche »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #124
diffeomorphism wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid? Waiting in long lines? Not having votes on a holiday like in civilized countries?

All of those are solvable (and solved in most western countries). Re. Covid, it would be a simple solution to spread in person voting out a few days. It would be an inconvenience but no need to invent a new system.

You're assuming those in power want to increase enfranchisement.

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

#185

Post by eloff »

BurningFrog wrote: post #156
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…

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 coun…

You can make the vote anonymous with electronic voting, in a way only you can verify if you wanted. There are existing voting systems with that property.

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

#186

Post by beaner »

ses1984 wrote: post #176
beaner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

Did you stop reading right at the end of the part you quoted?

Yes, not sure how it's related.

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

#189

Post by eloff »

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.

The first point is a strawman. The second is obviously something the system would have to be built for, and that would be arguably more verifiable than what we have now.

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

#190

Post by tudorhn »

sebmellen wrote: post #39
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…

Not necessarily a dumb idea, but blockchains provide us an easier way to do something similar. Every voter would be provided 1 (one) "Right to Vote" token after verifying their identity or receiving it by mail (as is the proposed solution from the USPS). This is arguably just as secure as mail-in voting. Each voter would also have an "on-chain voter ID", which would just be an anonymous public-private keypair in poss…

> This on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter

The government will generate these IDs and then mail them to people. Who’s stopping them from recording the mappings?

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