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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

#291

Post by cheph »

atoav wrote: post #270
cheph wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Definitely, I would have it 10 times slower to increase integrity. I think people that have not lived under despotic regimes maybe don't understand the potential downsides of a loss in election integrity.

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

#292

Post by salawat »

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…

Looking at that ballot for Newport News doesn't seem at all ambiguous to me.

The instructions aren't just for those filling it out. The reader should only have interpreted the properly filled in circle. The ones with marks through them are a near universal indication of "Don't count this," everywhere I go. I've also been known to either annotate, leave an instruction to th He reader, or say screw it and ask for a new ballot.

Given the significant other was completely flummoxed though when asked cold, I see your point.

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

#293

Post by hrktb »

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…

> Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

I think that’s an extreme position that would be hard to argue keeping, in particular in the current situation.

I see it the same way we deal with money: what is fundamentally different that makes us accept electronic money transfers as core part of our life but argue there’s no way electronic voting could be possible ? Saying current proposed solutions are not good is different from being against it on principle.

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

#295

Post by shrubble »

violetyellow wrote: post #120
shrubble wrote: post #85

I never understood why voting remains such an issue. Why not have the credit card companies handle voting? The cost of a card with the chip is less than $2 isn't it? The card is swiped into a reader, the ballot is displayed on screen, choices are made and confirmed, a laser printer prints out a paper ballot which is dropped into a secure box. We would know within 1 hour of polls closing the accurate tally of every ra…

Suppose I'm a bad guy with Trump, I command the credit card company to issue 1 million fake cards with names which are passed away in last century. Ask my agents to sweep these cards and vote for me. How could you civilians prevent these things from happening?

Voter rolls are maintained by the separate states.

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

#296

Post by brundolf »

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.

Exactly. This is the entire problem with blockchain: it has absolutely nothing to say about the quality of the data entering the system, which is usually the hard part anyway. But it provides this false sense of security because most people have no idea what it actually means.

It's only useful when the entire problem space lives inside the blockchain. As soon as it has to reflect something in the real world, all bets are off.

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

#297

Post by jlokier »

hwillis wrote: post #45
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…

??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.

I agree, when consensus is the per-transaction kind used in, say, Bitcoin.

However, a Zero-Knowledge Proof-based consensus (https://zkproof.org) can produce agreement on a combined result without revealing the individual inputs.

It's not easy, and you still have to prove the protocol has been followed, that is that everyone voted even though you don't know what they voted for.

But it's a type of consensus which you do want.

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

#298

Post by ChrisLomont »

dashundchen wrote: post #180
ChrisLomont wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> t can be verified with a pencil and piece of paper and a calculator, so anybody can do it. The size of the resulting number would be so incredibly large that no person with pencil and paper and calculator would have even the tiniest chance of being able to verify their number. The chance of even copying it down correctly once would be tiny. The number of pages to write it out is huge. The time for a person to check…

Since most voting is handled and tallied by county/sub-divisions of that county, and are published as such, wouldn't the number be much smaller? A few thousand per district since you only need to be unique to the place your vote is tallied.

At any scale this method is unusable by the vast majority of people, and it doesn’t prevent tons of other problems such as fake votes added.

Next, votes were once public, but it was too easy to prove who you voted for, making buying votes more valuable. These methods would bring that back, since a voter could prove who they voted for. The US did this for its first 50 years, and Kentucky even had it till ~1890. The modern private vote made it harder to determine who someone voted for, since if someone paid me for a vote I could still vote how I pleased and they couldn’t check me.

The above simplistic method would bring back vote buying.

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

#299

Post by jlokier »

sebmellen wrote: post #58
hwillis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.

This is not true if the voting apparatus is separate from the identity of the voter. There are two ways to accomplish this, and the USPS is proposing that they ship voters a sort of "private key", which is fully anonymous, which has no connection to their identity. This key is used once, with the right to cast one vote. In such a system, the whole blockchain will know what each public key voted for. The difference is…

I look forward to the national outrage in year 2075 when it is discovered that 90% of "voting citizens" were tokens stored in the basement of the White House, and nobody noticed for 50 years.

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

#300

Post by RealityVoid »

RunawayGalaxy wrote: post #260
koheripbal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are asking, then you don't understand how the blockchain works. It's literally the entire point of the chain.

Prove that your blockchain hasn't been compromised by a sophisticated 51% attack.

You can't. A 51% attack is literally "the network".

And I wouldn't call a 51% attack sophisticated, really. It's just having a bigger hammer than the other guy.

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