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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

#261

Post by the_snooze »

throwaway936482 wrote: post #258
the_snooze wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this ma…

1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.

The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.

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

#262

Post by staunch »

oAlbe wrote: post #259
staunch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

> A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. So instead of trusting a few thousands (several thousands, in reality) and a system where you can literally walk in the place where they are counting votes and observe them, you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? How does that follow? And this doesn't even tak…

> ...you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it?

Of course not. All of the software should be open source, with multiple independent implementations, test suites, etc. And the data should be open to analysis by any number of people while preserving people's right to privacy (this is one of the hard parts).

Most people have no any idea how electronic voting machines work today, so why does it matter if laymen understand the internet voting system?

The point is that anyone that is willing and able could verify for themselves that the system does work as intended. Not that most people will actually put in the effort. Most will rely on trusting experts, but anyone is free to verify.

With paper ballots and a handful of officials involved, there is no way for a voter to verify anything, they are forced to rely on trust alone.

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

#263

Post by owenmarshall »

eloff wrote: post #211
M2Ys4U wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote. But that also means the guy with the big wrench can follow your vote and so see whether you voted the way he told you or not, and that allows him to decide whether to smash your kneecaps in. Electronic voting enables corruption.

That's not at all a required feature of electronic voting.

I have seen systems that allow for a real vote as well as a masked vote - so you get verified votes but have a fake vote to show if you want or need.

But consider: at this very moment, right above you is a comment with a picture of ballot that was filled out improperly and lead to a tied election. If we can’t teach people to fill in a circle properly, how in the world do we expect them to use or understand a system that guarantees verifiability as well as anonymity.

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

#264

Post by throwaway936482 »

staunch wrote: post #250
throwaway936482 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

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 se…

Nope, it relies on me being able to go to my local church Hall and watch the ballots being counted or take part in the count myself. All the parties in the election send their own representatives along to watch over the ballot and they also keep a running total. It is a process that I can verify is being carried out correct with my own eyes. Saying "citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify" In an e voting situation is just wrong, since I can verify the current process by going and watching it or taking part in it, whereas in magical block chain land I am losing the ability to verify because i am replacing a simple process with one that relies me to trust a bunch of code written by and understood by probably a few dozen people. This requires much more trust than the current situation.

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

#265

Post by throwaway936482 »

the_snooze wrote: post #261
throwaway936482 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.

The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.

Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.

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

#267

Post by solarkraft »

cc23 wrote: post #139
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 c…

A blockchain is a database.

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

#268

Post by staunch »

throwaway936482 wrote: post #264
staunch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Nope, it relies on me being able to go to my local church Hall and watch the ballots being counted or take part in the count myself. All the parties in the election send their own representatives along to watch over the ballot and they also keep a running total. It is a process that I can verify is being carried out correct with my own eyes. Saying "citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to…

You can only observe a single ballot counting location, while there are hundreds or thousands to observe. Someone could be bribing people in dozens or hundreds of locations and there are lots of tricks to pull.

You're not really verifying much at all by watching the counting process. It's really just a false sense of security. You actually have no idea if all the ballots are being counted, if they're all real ballots, or if some have been tampered with, etc.

There are millions of programmers in the world, any number of them could decide to audit the code, and if they discover flaw, everyone could be told in an instant. There could be huge security bounties to incentive audits. We trust math and software to maintain all of civilization but for some reason it's impossible to make it work for voting? That seems incredibly unlikely.

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

#269

Post by ehnto »

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…

The OP was trying to point out that whilst you and I may understand the mechanism in order to trust it, others can't, because they won't be able to understand why it's trustworthy. My friends don't understand crypto, so they can only ever trust it if they trust me (or the person telling them it's trustworthy).

Imagine this, you rig a crypto-vote not through technical means, you just say you won even though the blockchain says you didn't. How many people in your country do you think will believe the experts over the politicians? My honest opinion about the US, is that the experts will lose.

It doesn't matter if you're right if no one believes you, and currently people believe the paper vote because they can understand how it would be executed fairly.

The fact is that currently, America's democracy is in danger because people are going to find it hard to trust even a paper vote during this election. No matter which way the vote swings, by planting the seed of doubt, the current administration has undermined the vote.

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

#270

Post by atoav »

cheph wrote: post #215
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…

> So phrased differently, one of the most important properties of any voting systems is that people afterwards can't just call the result into question. This is a solved problem with in person voting, I would say that is one thing where South Africa has gotten it down quite well. There is voter ID at the polls with voter registers to ensure only citizens can vote and nobody can vote twice, vote boxes are sealed and o…

Which is precisely the strength of such a system. People often complain about voting being slow — but being slow is a feature not a bug in this case. Better slow and right than fast and wrong.
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