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

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

#281

Post by godelski » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

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.…

> first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems

I'm guessing you watch a lot of CPG Grey. You should check out Cardinal Voting systems[0], specifically Approval[1] and STAR[2], as these better fix a lot of the problems. Fargo recently had great success with approval[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

[3] https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-f...

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

#282

Post by doubleCs » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #80

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…

> building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ This is patently untrue when it comes to security. OpenBSD is the closest thing I'm aware of to a "secure" widely used system, and I'm sure that OpenBSD machines are compromised every day. The day that a network exploit is treated with the same seriousness as a commercial jetliner crash is the day I'll believe software security has grown up.

Well when I said reliably I wasn't really thinking about something as difficult as security in a system as complex as an OS...

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

#283

Post by godelski » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

owenmarshall wrote: post #263

eloff wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Is the problem "people not filling in circles properly" or is the problem that there are other errors. If I'm not mistaken you're referring to the hanging chad issue. The reason it was an issue is because it is hard to see the chad. We're in tech, this should be unsurprising that machines don't work with 100% efficiency. If your machine (human or computer) is marking a ballot it would be unsurprising if the mark is transposed or warped or incomplete. Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner.

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

#284

Post by nathias » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

fsh wrote: post #150

nathias wrote: post #12

We should be experimenting with electronic voting for 30 years and innovate solutions to its problems. Nobody thinks it doesn't have problems, but to just stop at pen and paper voting just means to affirm the problems of pen and paper which are IMO much worse. (scarce voting, batched issues)

Most european countries simply don't have any problems with pen and paper voting. Turnout is typically much larger than in the US with its crazy mix of electronic/mail-in/in-person voting. Probably this is due to automatic voter registration for all citizens, having the elections on Sunday or on a holiday, and (in some cases) not having a first-past-the-post system where a large fraction of votes don't matter anyway.

Yes we do, everyone has them. There is an unimaginable difference between a system where you can have a referendum on =X once per year and it costs 10mil or a system where you can have a referendum every second and it costs ~0. We can then vote for issues directly instead of having people that may or may not (as is most often the case) vote in a way they signal they would before elected.

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

#285

Post by ellis-bell » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

DabbyDabberson wrote: post #241

sebmellen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. This is a comment from someone who (I presume) is unaware of the advances in Proof-of-Stake blockchains, and other consensus protocols like the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus - one of the main things that sets a blockchain apart from a distributed database. This consensus mechanism is what's important when something important (like an elect…

> Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus. what about something like the Raft protocol?

You are right that Raft and Paxos provide for distributed consensus. However, they don't do so in an open, byzantine environment where some fraction of the nodes in the network may not be honest.

edit: there are byzantine variants of paxos --- i'm not 100% familiar with these (and tbh i'm take it or leave it on the whole thing), just wanted to note that i think the parent was trying to get at something slightly different than consensus in an environment with nodes that fail, i.e. "traditional" consensus algorithms

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

#286

Post by dQw4w9WgXcQ » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

ihm wrote: post #276

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.

This seems to be the tech underneath Algorand. If the USPS created a "Vote Token" and it was truly anonymized, how would a central entity ensure that people were not double-voting etc?

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

#287

Post by nemothekid » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

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.

It is a requirement of voting though. The current system prevents you from knowing how I voted, which then prevents you from influencing my vote.

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

#288

Post by throwaway936482 » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #273

throwaway936482 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

Of course paper ballots can be undermined. The point is that you can easily tell that they have been undermined by the big burly blokes following people into polling stations and threatening you if you don't vote for the preferred candidate, or the ballot boxes turning up in the swamp. You're asking us to trust a magic algorithm that, as I pointed out in another comment, is likely to be proprietary and back doored to hell and back because it is controlled and implemented by the sort of government that rigs elections. This opens up the possibility of subtle, undetectable election tampering, which is much harder to do with a properly run manual system that everyone can understand and participate in.

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

#289

Post by jlokier » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

DabbyDabberson wrote: post #241

sebmellen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. This is a comment from someone who (I presume) is unaware of the advances in Proof-of-Stake blockchains, and other consensus protocols like the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus - one of the main things that sets a blockchain apart from a distributed database. This consensus mechanism is what's important when something important (like an elect…

> Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus. what about something like the Raft protocol?

Yes, Raft (and Paxos) are indeed distributed consensus protocols.

But the GP is talking about distributed in blockchain-land, which uses terms differently.

In blockchain-land, it means "consensus among peers who do not trust each other".

In non-blockchain-land, there are what's called byzantine distributed consensus protocols, which as robust again deliberate subversion by some nodes in the network. Basically if nearly everyone votes one way, it doesn't matter what a few subversive nodes do. But byzantine robustness does have a cost (in time), so protocols are usually designed on the assumption that there may be faulty nodes, but the errors are not deliberate.

But even byzantine protocols assume the network is somewhat predefined.

Whereas in blockchain-land, you don't know how many peers there are, who they are, and you don't trust them. What you do trust is their motivations en masse, because there's money and power in it.

It uses economic and evenness-of-technological-progress factors to provide a level of collective trust. A core assumption is no motivated actor is sufficiently powerful to subvert everyone else. This assumption is not guaranteed by protocols, and can also be broken by collusion among large actors, because collusion makes them more powerful.

With proof-of-work, the assumption can also be broken if a sufficiently powerful new technology becomes available to one actor before anyone else. (I'm not sure what the situation is with proof-of-stake, which to be honest smells like RichGetRicher 3.0, but I don't know much about it.)

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

#290

Post by achow » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 5:26 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…

I guess both can be achieved - electronic voting along with a mechanism of having a verifiable 'agreeable consent'.

How electronic voting machines have improved India’s democracy

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect...

Excerpt:

..the study provides strong evidence that the introduction of EVMs led to (i) a significant decline in electoral fraud, (ii) strengthening the weaker and vulnerable sections of the society, and (iii) a more competitive electoral process.

Under the paper ballot system, polling booths would often be captured and ballot boxes would be stuffed, resulting in an unusually high voter turnout. EVMs helped tackle this risk by incorporating an important feature—registering only five votes per minute. Committing electoral fraud would require capturing polling booths for longer periods.

The success of the EVMs in India warranted a comprehensive audit mechanism to verify the votes cast. In 2013, the Election Commission of India formally incorporated Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines in the electoral systems. The VVPAT—leaving behind a paper trail of the vote cast—acts as an additional layer of verifiability and assurance in the electoral process. A paper record ensures that the vote has indeed gone to the intended candidate and is recorded as such.