USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

A distributed ledger approach is a very bad idea because a foreign country can launch a 51% attack on the ledger and has the resources to win and thus modify the ledger.

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines. Just marking a box with a cross, sticking it in a box and then a load of volunteers physically counting the votes while representatives of the parties and anyone else who wants to wander in watches. Postal votes are treated the same and counted at the same time in the same place. The system literally couldn't be simpler or less corruptible. There is no need for anything more complicated because the system works and can be understood by a five year old.

A lot of issues being brought up with electronic voting seem to me to be solvable via a blockchain technology like Ethereum.

> Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine.

If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go.

> Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key.

I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?

> is coercion really a threat on a large scale in the US

No, largely because of the secret vote and the fact that there is no way anyone can verify how "you" voted after the fact. So you can lie to the thug threatening you with a wrench that you voted for "candidate A" and the thug has no way to know otherwise.

> But if the onl way to know my vote is to have my random identifier, if I dispose of my random identifier, they can't know my vote.

If the thug with the wrench who has /suggested/ you vote for candidate A lest he break your kneecaps also knows you can verify your vote by using your random identifier, then if after the election you have disposed of your random identifier, the thug breaks your kneecaps because you disposed of your random identifier. Therefore you are still coerced to reveal your vote, because you are also coerced not to dispose of your random identifier until after the thug has verified you voted "the proper way". I.e. the thug changes tactics from "vote for A lest I break your kneecaps" to "vote for A and do not dispose of your identifier until I verify you voted my way lest I break your kneecaps".

> I feel we can both have total anonymity if a person desires, while also having verifiability.

If there is any form of ability to verify your actual individual vote, in any way, then there is no anonymity.

Anonymity is only available if there is no ability to verify an individual voted a particular way after the fact. Any opening of verification destroys all anonymity.

This system relies on tens of millions of people trusting a few thousand people not to have been bribed. Seems entirely corruptible and you have no idea whether it has been corrupted or not. You're just left hoping it hasn't been.

A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. And could still be backed by a physical system as well, for added security.

Citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify.

Oddly, even most people that work in technology are incredibly pessimistic about solving technical problems.But anyone doubts that internet voting will be commonplace and incredibly secure in the future is a level beyond pessimistic. The only open questions are when and how.