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

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

#361

Post by diebeforei485 » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

stansbury wrote: post #230

diebeforei485 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal. Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. I think the right strategy is to pick a sta…

Iowa Democrats tried an app this year, and it was a colossal failure: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-...

That is obviously not a good way to do things.

The general public wasn't informed about it, the app was from a company nobody had heard of, and evidently hadn't been tested well.

No, this should be an open transparent effort, with code published online (they need not accept PR's with code BTW). It should be trialled in a few states during an off-year election.

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

#362

Post by diebeforei485 » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

fwip wrote: post #316

diebeforei485 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a generational thing. Younger software engineers who grew up doing everything on their phones see this as something worth solving, because it would vastly improve access, end voter suppression, and people wouldn't have to take time off work to vote anymore. Universal mail-in ballots do address many of those points, but also have downsides (signature verification is tricky). Older engineers on the other hand don'…

Signature verification only really matters if you have several ballots purporting to be from the same person. Otherwise, they usually don't bother checking the signature. How do you propose to do user authentication more securely on your phone? Keep in mind that several people may have access to this phone, including spouses and children.

You don't live in California then: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/california-rejected-1000...

Also kids can fill out a mailed ballot as well, so that is a double standard.

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

#363

Post by sebmellen » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:23 AM UTC

donaltroddyn wrote: post #336

sebmellen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results of blockchain-based elections can be checked after the fact, that's true. But if the votes of the individuals in the electorate can be checked after the fact, the system was badly architected. The USPS solution linked by OP does not link the identity of a voter to their blockchain identity, so coercion remains as much of a threat as in postal voting. Blockchain-based voting systems can be either the least…

> I just think the above argument was made from a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain technology. Which misunderstanding of blockchains/merkle trees do you believe has caused the argument above to be incorrect? The system as described in the patent provides no protection that I can see against voter coercion, and in some embodiments, allows a voter to verify that their vote has been counted as cast, which is s…

To be clear, most of my other comments in this thread are solutions to problems I took from the top of my head. I'm not suggesting we implement a voting system off of my comments.

I also am not in favor of blockchain-based voting. Of course a "right-to-vote" token is, at the moment, a far worse solution than paper ballots at polling stations. Mostly, this limitation is pragmatic — we don't have good ways to store private keys, low-level hardware and software is not easily auditable, UX/UI issues, etc.

In the US, we are considering having the largest vote-by-mail election ever. This is a politically charged issue, where Trump claims mail-in-voting will lead to massive voter fraud, and the Democratic party claims otherwise. If you suggest that mail-in-voting may be insecure, you're labelled as a Trump supporter.

With this political landscape in mind, electronic voting vs. postal voting is certainly a pertinent discussion. This comes especially as Trump has made efforts to "DDoS" the USPS by kneecapping its throughput. This would, depending on the system's design, be harder to do with electronic voting. Estonia is a good example of how digital voting can be implemented securely, with the approval and understanding of the populous.

But my main contention is that there are ways that blockchain voting can be fully anonymous, even if we don't have the implementation capability right now. Zero-Knowledge proofs, combined with a system where the voter's real identity is never mapped to their on-chain public key, allow for this. The individual voter would receive a private key in the mail, or using a Monero-like blockchain they would generate their private key and redeem one "Right to Vote" token, which would be sent to their account. They would then vote with this token, and using a "view key" would be able to audit that their vote was cast for X party.

Nowhere in this system would real identity be mapped to blockchain identity. The risk of "deanonymization" is therefore about the same as with mail-in voting. A coercer could force you to show them the results of your vote afterwards, true, but there are ways around this as well. Most simply, all view keys could be revoked after casting a vote. The public "token balances" of each candidate would be viewable, but the results of an individual vote not.

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

#364

Post by lalaland1125 » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:25 AM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #360

lalaland1125 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you are interested, the thing preventing those types of shenanigans from happening is volunteer observers from various parties. The inperson and physical nature of things makes it much more difficult to break.

Yes, and volunteer observers could also ensure that the keypairs mailed out to people are never revealed. 1. An airgapped computer running a keypair generation program generates millions of keypairs. 2. This prints these millions of secure keypairs with the keypair facing "downward". 3. In a publicized setting with volunteer observers, the private keys are sealed into envelopes which don't yet have names or addresses…

The level of complexity for auditing here is much, much higher than the paper system. How do you verify that the software wasn't backdoored? How do you verify that the computer actually ran that software? What if the hardware had a backdoor? What about the compiler? Even the printers could be compromised.

Normally, I would consider these types of issues simply paranoia, but in this case we are talking about very high stake elections that control the spending of trillions of dollars.

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

#365

Post by undersuit » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

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…

I'm against it for all your points and many more. We're stupid, electronic voting puts the onus on you to figure out so many things from why your operating system broke voting to why the apostrophe in your last name still breaks things.

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

#366

Post by arkanciscan » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 12:40 AM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #353

arkanciscan wrote: post #256

See, this is why I'm voting for Trump; whether he means to or not, he breaks shit, and that's what I think has to happen for progress to occur. Joe is status quo. I want an omelette, not a bunch of eggs.

That should be biden's campaign ad. Just have that read out over some photos of people who've died of COVID. Sure he's undermining American democracy, and openly defending white supremacists (white power anyone) but he breaks shit!

We need two countries. One for people who just want things to stay the same because they are scared, and one for people who want things to be better.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #281

djsumdog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]…

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by Galanwe » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 1:44 AM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #311

xorcist wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want to issue new tokens either, because you can't know for sure that the token was really stolen. In which it won't take many users who demonstratably can't vote because someone stolen their token for someone to question the outcome. The only point of democratic elections is the legitimacy of the result.

When a large-scale vote is really tight, there will be people questioning its legitimacy anyway, no matter if it's technically correct. When a vote outcome is clearly in favour of one direction, people don't tend to argue about the legitimacy of it, provided the process was reasonable enough. In that case, the numbers might be argued, but not the outcome unless there is a stronger belief in vote-rigging or voter-supp…

While I agree with you on the big picture, at the individual level, it's becomes really hard to justify.

Imagine the following conversation:

- "officier, my wallet just got robbed, I had my voting digital card in it, what can I do?"

- "nothing, anyway a single vote does not matter in the overall election"

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

#369

Post by revnode » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 1:59 AM UTC

beaner wrote: post #191

revnode wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of the population doesn't have the capacity to understand what you wrote or why that is true. Even the majority of those who understand why it may be true, cannot say for certain that it is true without inspecting the codebase and its operation. That's a major problem.

I mean, you could say the same thing about current electronic voting or even about how aggregate paper voting is counted behind the scenes. Those things involve some level of trust. I don’t think what I wrote is that difficult to understand. I think you’re underestimating people when you say “the overwhelming majority of the people do not have the capacity to understand what you said.” Really? Not even the capacity t…

> Really? Not even the capacity to understand?

Yup. I'm pretty sure most software engineers don't even know how something as basic as hashing works. They just put lego blocks together, without much understanding of even how those lego blocks work.

When it comes to traditional voting, it's fairly easy to understand. You cast your vote, then someone counts them. You don't care how they count it, even if it's with an aid of a machine. You just care that you cast, someone fairly counts.

With a blockchain, there is no person involved and there is no counting. You vote and some piece of software that most software engineers don't even understand tells you who won. That is really not going to engender trust from anyone, not even software engineers.

I work on blockchains all the time and even I wouldn't trust that thing. Good luck convincing someone who doesn't even know how to reboot their iPhone.

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

#370

Post by sebmellen » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 2:02 AM UTC

Yetanfou wrote: post #323

sebmellen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculous argument, because it could just as well apply to mail-in voting as blockchain-based voting. I also think this fear is far overstated (do we have any stories of this happening in the US?) and the more pernicious forms of voter suppression and misinformation are downplayed. If blockchain systems allow 90% of the populace to vote unencumbered, with a 5% inaccuracy rate (which is far higher than to b…

"blockchain systems" - which I notice you're invested in by virtue of leading a startup which in some way utilises blockchain technology - may be able to help in reducing the opportunities to cheat on the technology side. This is not the main problem when combating voter coercion, a problem which you noted also exists with mail-in voting. This is true and it is one of the reasons why mail-in voting (as compared to ab…

I vote for simplicity too. As I've tried to be clear in mentioning, I am not in favor of a voting system like this.

For the foreseeable future, paper ballots cast at a polling station are all that make sense.

The discussion is in part relevant because the US is on the verge of having the largest mail-in election ever. Trump claims this is insecure, the Democratic party claims otherwise. It's a political hot-button issue, and seems likely to happen. For this reason, I think exploring alternate systems is worthwhile.

I hope that makes sense.