USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by throwaway936482 » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #262

oAlbe wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

This is bull. You can be one of the people who does the counting or you can watch it take place. There should be no electronic voting machines involved, that's the whole point of having a manual system. That allows basically anyone who wants to, including a hypothetical five year old, to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system relies on me going out and getting a PhD in cryptography to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system requires basically everyone to rely on trust, a well designed manual system requires basically no one to rely on trust. I know which one I'd prefer.

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

#272

Post by cheerlessbog » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #72

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…

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…

This is part of the reason we still use plurality voting.

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

#273

Post by staunch » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

throwaway936482 wrote: post #271

staunch wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 d…

This is bull. You can be one of the people who does the counting or you can watch it take place. There should be no electronic voting machines involved, that's the whole point of having a manual system. That allows basically anyone who wants to, including a hypothetical five year old, to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system relies on me going out and getting a PhD in cryptography to verify that…

You're trusting that all the ballots are present, that no fake ballots have been added, and none have been tampered with, that the officials are all acting in good faith, aren't making mistakes, haven't been bribed, etc.

Do you really think paper ballots have not been used to rig elections? Because that's absurd given the current situation in Belarus and the long history of ballot tampering going back thousands of years.

Paper ballot counting is security theater. A system based on math and software could be provably secure.

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

#274

Post by the_snooze » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

throwaway936482 wrote: post #265

the_snooze wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm not sure then what urgent problem you're trying to solve that warrants the cost of errors introduced by the manual counting of huge amounts of paper ballots. It would also be a logistical nightmare getting reams of paper to voters and getting them back and tracking them; at my polling place, we have to make sure that the number of ballots we issued out equals the number reported by the scanner (plus the number of spoiled ballots voters returned to us for disposal). I'm just pointing out that cost.

If you don't trust the tabulating machines, we have mechanisms to check them at scale. Basically, randomly sample the paper ballots and check them against the machine results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit

If you don't trust the people running elections, you should know that polling places in the US are run by community volunteers. Literally anyone who's a registered voter can participate and see how the sausage is made. In fact, there's a shortage of these folks, so boards of election are thrilled to get more people participating.

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

#275

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

mgualt wrote: post #222

Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?

Patents take several years to be granted. This is an application, it was filed February 7, 2020.

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

#276

Post by ihm » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #231

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. Th…

You can us zero knowledge proofs plus a blockchain to anonymize votes.

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

#277

Post by throwaway936482 » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #268

throwaway936482 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again, I can be one of the people doing the counting. Not being funny but if you have an already corrupt electoral system then your government is not going to adopt your magical, totally secure, block chain based, bug free system. They're going to adopt a compromised, proprietary, back doored e voting solution say "look, magical block chain verification as recommended by geeks" and then attack / arrest / kill anyone who questions it's veracity. You're trying to solve a social problem, a corrupt government, with a technological solution that the government itself will undermine or reject. On the other hand you can run free and fair elections by leveraging the powers of observers and volunteers in a war zone or with a corrupt government using paper, pens, boxes and locks.

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

#278

Post by doubleCs » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

shireboy wrote: post #90

doublesCs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our entire field is bad at what we do. Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers. Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon). Ho…

You mean like the 125m Mars orbiter lost due to engineers forgetting imperial/metric conversion? https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...

I could answer, but I'm not going to because I don't like your sarcasm.

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

#279

Post by compsciphd » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

pwg wrote: post #248

compsciphd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is coercion really a threat on a large scale in the US (I'm sure in other countries it is). 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. i.e. I feel we can both have total anonymity if a person desires, while also having verifiability. as an example: a random uuid is assigned to me and my votes are printed out on a slip of paper wit…

> 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,…

and what would happen if you forced a random sampling of individuals to destroy their slips? so random group can verify but you have no idea who is in that random group?

edit: or perhaps better, a random sampling were permitted to print out a proof of vote slip, but didn't have to. But if not chosen, you didn't get a proof of vote slip.

Now, in thinking it through, it might not help much. if someone can manipulate the voting machines, they can know who printed out their slips and manipulate the other votes. With that said, if done correctly, with a paper trail, I think it be difficult.

i.e. users are giving 1 or 2 outputs. piece 1 is a paper print out with a uuid and their votes that gets deposited in big box and counted as deposited. piece 2 that not everyone even has an option to get, can be kept. there has to be no way to distinguish the different piece 1s of those who get a piece 2 or not. If so, if everyone who got a piece 2 sees that their vote was recorded per the record they have, they can be confident that their vote was recorded correctly.

if their vote is not recorded correctly, they should have an anonymous mechanism to deposit their slips to make known that their vote was not recorded correctly. (hand waving at that, as unsure how to do that).

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

#280

Post by blackearl » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

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…

We can't even have nearly half the nation agree on mask wearing. People completely disregard what doctors and scientists think. What makes you believe they'll listen to some San Fran programmer??