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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

#231

Post by ddingus »

So, we are making all the votes a matter of public record?

It's either do that, or the voter is forced to blind trust whatever system is used to record their voter intent.

To consider this problem properly, think about the problem a blind voter has with a ballot. They cannot see the record of their vote, when it's made by a mark. With a punch card, they cannot see the candidate associated with their record either.

They have to trust whoever helps them cast their vote actually does cast it correctly. There is no chain of trust between voter intent and the record of vote cast.

Now, in the context of electronic voting, a person touches a screen gives an audio input, whatever. They have to trust the system does what they intend. There is no meaningful verification due to the fact that the system could tell them anything.

When a vote is cast on media with a mark, and that mark and media are used for the final tally, the voter knows their intent was recorded, and that intent could be used directly to determine the outcome of the election.

(other corruption can happen, and is outside the scope of this comment)

Without a public vote record, voters have no idea whether they can trust the election. Blockchain does not help with this problem, unless it's a public affair, everyone sees how everyone else voted.

Banking gets around this by always having redundancies. Books are kept in many locations and all must and can be reconciled.

Voting has no such redundancy, and due to that, electronic input has a basic trust problem not being discussed enough in my opinion.

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

#232

Post by djsumdog »

koheripbal wrote: post #157
the_snooze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

2000 and Bush Gore. They had three official recounts. The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. The Supreme Court ended up appointing Bush and the nation's voting commissions learned an important lesson.

But like OP said, volunteers could see the process. The recounts were actually pretty damn close; it was just the election was way too close for that to be acceptable.

In general the US system, as crap as it is (first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems), the electoral and state-based rules do mean that election fraud isn't too big a deal. New York will likely always go Blue. Tennessee will always go Red. Even if there is same fraud there, it doesn't matter that much because of the way votes are allocated per state. It's not fair, but that's the system the US has.

Fraud matters greatly in states were elections are close (Florida, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) and it will get even worse thanks to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, if that gets triggered.

Potential fraud in swing states or NaPoVolIterCo are incredibly dangerous right now, because what we cannot have in America is loss of faith in the election system. That will be disastrous. We would not survive the 2000 Bush/Gore election today.

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

#233

Post by arp242 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #218

If you were creating a society on Mars, would you use a system of people lining up in-person to vote? Probably not. Rigged elections have been a thing for a very long time. The shenanigans in Belarus is only the latest example. Covid-19 will accelerate the inevitable. We're having a mail-in election this year, people will get comfortable voting from home and it's only a matter of time before people start asking why t…

The vote in Belarus was rigged by the government: "Lukashenko controls vote counting, [and abused] a vast security apparatus and a noisy state media machine unwavering in its support for him and contempt for his rivals". In other words: it required a vast conspiracy with many people cooperating in various ways to pull off. We've seen the same with rigged elections in Russia and some other places.

Compare this to an electronic system where a very small group of people (possibly even just one person) can potentially significantly skew the election results.

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

#234

Post by ddingus »

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, and I just dropped a comment. E-voting of any kind, unless it results in a public record of the vote, has basic trust issues. Voters cannot know their intent was reflected in the final tally.

Blockchain does not help with this.

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

#235

Post by zacharycohn »

propogandist wrote: post #227
atlgator wrote: post #200

It's the illusion of safety. There is no facility for identity verification baked into blockchain. You have integrity for the data allowed on the chain but if you let Russian hackers write to it, it undermines the whole thing. Personally I'd rather go with a PKI system that offers non-repudiation.

what Russian hackers?

Apt username for a comment like this.

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

#236

Post by rudolph9 »

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…

Keep in mind, network packets could be delivered by carrier pigeons.

I’m all for paper ballots and conventional signature based system based system but combine that with cryptographically secure techniques for distributed systems (on paper).

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

#237

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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…

Why can we have online banking and Tesla autopilot and online medical prescriptions but not online voting?

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

#238

Post by the_snooze »

djsumdog wrote: post #232
koheripbal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2000 and Bush Gore. They had three official recounts. The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. The Supreme Court ended up appointing Bush and the nation's voting commissions learned an important lesson. But like OP said, volunteers could see the process.…

>The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots.

This shows that recount disputes almost always boil down to whether to accept a particular ballot one way or another. It's not fraud. You're just bound to run into ambiguity once or twice in a large election. It usually doesn't matter, but it can pop up when an election is really close.

There was a literal tied election in Virginia a few years ago that stemmed from an ambiguous mark for delegate: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cro...

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

#239

Post by wtracy »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #171
Ericson2314 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal. Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. I think the right strategy is to pick a sta…

> Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition

In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail.

> but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped.

New issues are unpredictable, and do not have known mitigations. (Once they can be reliably predicted and mitigated, they are no longer "new".) There's also no known upper bound on the amount of damage these issues can cause.

As an added bonus, the quantity of bugs in a long-deployed system is generally well understood, while it's difficult to place an upper bound on the number of bugs in a system that hasn't been tested in production yet.

To make this concrete: Imagine finding a bug that causes several thousand phones to occasionally reboot unexpectedly. Pleased with yourself, you publish a patch and push it out to all affected devices.

One week later, a thousand of those devices power off and never power on again--they've been permanently bricked by your update.

Are your users angry because you refused to give the random reboots a "free pass" because of "tradition"? Or are they angry because you made drastic changes to a system that basically worked without taking the time to understand the consequences?

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

#240

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Political people play all sorts of games with elections physically. Don’t underestimate the lack of good faith that people will act with. But the system itself works.

The scary thing about electronic voting to me is the centralized nature. It needs to be decentralized to protect the overall system. The current scenario where a trusted entity (the USPS) is being de-legitimized needs to be factored in to protect democracy.

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