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Debian decides to allow secret votes

lwn.net

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Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#181

Post by eulenteufel »

mw888 wrote: post #71
gjulianm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system? Most vote countings are public. I can go to my polling place, cast my vote, check that nobody tampers with the box, watch how they count every vote correctly, ensure that the written tallies are correct, and then verify that the central system tallies match with those I counted.

Great, ZKProofs present the possibility for everyone to do better than that with much less work.

Paper ballots requiring a lot of work is the whole point. This makes tampering at scale a lot more difficult and a lot easier to detect.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#182

Post by mcosta »

svnpenn wrote: post #138
blueflow wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand behind Debian to do votes in secrecy. During the RMS issue, I've seen many people who did not have their ferocity under control. This went as far as people wanting to have the "others" removed from the Debian project. People not being able to cast their vote without having to fear repercussions is justification enough for secret votes.

If you can't justify your vote, then maybe you shouldn't be voting. Anonymous voting should be enjoyed by the masses, never the ones representing them.

Justification doesn't work whe the other side is just yelling white supremacy

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#183

Post by rurban »

SpodGaju wrote: post #150
incomingpain wrote: post #132

Quoted post unavailable.

I do not know all the politics of this, but reducing transparency is never a good sign. I love Debian for their openness. Death spiral. Well that sucks. Where next? Ubuntu is horrible, Fedora, maybe? Manjaro?

this as hyperbole as their most important decisions cone from their private list.

now they fear this tyranny of the private list, hence secret voting is considered a protection.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#184

Post by 0des »

INTPenis wrote: post #7
hans1729 wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

I understand you, but you picked a strange hill to fight on. Lwn is such a simple website, and the article is just one paragraph. Also what is reader mode to you? Because in Firefox I clicked the little reader view icon in the url bar and it showed me a reader view with just the main content.

Reader mode is an accessibility feature. Please do not question someone for needing help.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#185

Post by treeman79 »

dhzhzjsbevs wrote: post #113
toast0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes. If the ballot were different, the results would be too. You can't take the results of one ballot and mush them around to support a hypothetical result; see also counting of the 'popular vote' for US president, a ballot which has never been tried, and whose results are unknowable. A vote for 4 says (to m…

It's a binary decision. The only way to properly poll that is either rank choice voting or a second vote after voting to change or not.

Diluting the vote of your opponent/position is quite common.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-...

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#187

Post by treeman79 »

dagw wrote: post #163
gregmac wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see also counting of the 'popular vote' for US president, a ballot which has never been tried, and whose results are unknowable. I don't follow this point. I'm not an American, but my understanding is counting via simple popular vote vs "electoral college" doesn't change the ballot itself, you still vote for the president directly; it just changes the way the ballots are counted. Are you suggesting either something…

or that people would making a different vote if it was counted differently? Two changes would happen. A lot of people who don't vote today because their state either heavily favours the 'wrong' candidate or the 'right' candidate will already win by a massive margin, would start voting, since all of sudden their vote matters a lot more. Secondly, and more importantly, candidates would campaign very differently. In tod…

This also makes many states cease to matter.

Already a big issue that big cities vote one way while rural voters go another way.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#188

Post by iso1210 »

eulenteufel wrote: post #176
iso1210 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority. Except we allow postal voting pretty much willy nilly, especailly in areas where intimidation can happen

I don't know how it's done in the USA, but in Germany voting by post has to be carried out before the day of the election. The actual postal votes are stored and only opened on the day of the election. After somebody send in their postal vote they can go to the public voting office and declare to invalidate their postal vote. The people counting the postal votes will get a list with invalidated votes and remove these…

If there is a way to invalidate a vote in the UK, I'm not aware of it, and as someone who's actively stood for election I've got a greater awareness of the average voter, and 50% of people have less awareness than the average voter.

It's not about selling, which would be easy to detect like all large conspiracies. It's about subtle coercion that postal voting can enable.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#189

Post by codedokode »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #120
codedokode wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronic voting is very difficult to monitor and verify independently, especially when voter lists are not publicly available. It is difficult to verify whether turnout number is correct, and on the countrary it is easy to add millions of fictious voters and vote for them. > it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. Let's say you voted for candidate A and didn't find y…

> Let's say you voted for candidate A and didn't find your vote. How can you prove that you really voted for A? With ZKP it would look something as follows: 1. Encrypt a vote with a commonly known public key and publish it to the bulletin board. 2. Shuffle the votes and producing a ZKP proof of correctness assuring that only votes from bulletin board where shuffled, no vote were added, removed or modified. 3. Tally t…

I didn't understand the algorithm completely (for example, whether you post your vote anonymously or under your name, and where is the private key for the public key you mentioned).

Let's say bulletin board software replaces the vote with 20% probability. You post your vote for candidate A and see that it didn't appear on the board (because the board replaced it with vote for candidate B, but you don't know about it). How can you prove that you tried to vote for A and not for B? The records show that you have voted, and as voting is anonymous it is impossible to know how you voted.

Of course, there are other ways to meddle with such election. For example, you see that the turnout is 99%. How can you verify this number? The government refuses to publish a list of voters because GDPR doesn't allow that. And even if the country publishes this list how you can verify that the list doesn't contain fictious voters?

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#190

Post by evouga »

coffeeblack wrote: post #160

Adds even more politics to tech decisions. Seems obvious what the result will be.

If Debian didn’t want politics in their tech decisions, they should have focused their scope on tech decisions rather than politics.

Not that there’s anything wrong with an organization holding forth on “issues of the day,” per se. But there is an iron law, effective ever since GamerGate-style tactics of “collecting receipts” and cross-platform and offline hounding became normalized as righteous retribution rather than harassment and bullying: your organization can have at most two of (1) transparency, (2) candor; (3) broader social relevance.

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