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Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

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Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#31

Post by exabrial »

Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, they check your eligibility, then you’re given an anonymous ticket, in another room you vote using said ticket, and get a receipt. You can see your but counted online using said receipt.

There are two problems with this: 1. You can’t verify extra or in eligible voters voted. 2. It relies on trust that to tell you your vote was counted.

I am very interested in reading about this protocol, and it might make a fun hobby to re implement it as a research project.

The one issue I have is: the act of physically showing up is an important one. Mass stuffing of ballot boxes is nearly impossible when physical presence is required. It also puts ‘your ass in the game’, meaning you really care so to speak; as you have to do a minor piece of physical labor in order to get your vote counted.

If this protocol could be adapted to the physical world, I think it would be perfect barring any other issues.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#32

Post by inhumantsar »

trte9343r4 wrote: post #9

In reality private keys will be mailed in insecure envelopes, issued multiple times (just to be sure) or issued to people, who are not citizens, moved away or died.

I don't disagree, the identity matching and uniqueness problem is a tough nut to crack.

it's worth keeping in mind though that this is an issue the current system faces. voters end up duplicated in the rolls under different addresses or old names, or they don't get removed from the rolls after losing eligibility or dying.

once upon a time I got two voter cards in the mail, one forwarded from an old address. I was eligible in two districts after nothing more extraordinary than moving across town. had to call in to get removed from the extra district.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#34

Post by declan_roberts »

AngriestLettuce wrote: post #28
declan_roberts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure as long as I get to pick the sample.

Sure, as long as it's a random sample

Absolutely, as long as I get to pick the random number generator that generates the random sample.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#35

Post by BSDobelix »

AngriestLettuce wrote: post #28
declan_roberts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure as long as I get to pick the sample.

Sure, as long as it's a random sample

Why take random samples if you tell your citizens that everyone has a vote? How do you proof it was random, and what do you do if by random chance you got a really on sided group? Sorry we have now a fascist state but it was random so it's fair.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#36

Post by pessimizer »

peterhunt wrote: post #4
tromp wrote: post #3

> Using the web interface, the voter enters her credential and selects her vote. Her computer then computes the ballot, which corresponds to the vote encrypted with the election public key. Like most (or all?) online protocols, this doesn't protect against vote selling or vote coercion.

The same could be said of mail in paper ballots too, which have seen widespread adoption in the United States starting in 2020, so I don’t think this should be a knock against this system.

You haven't heard people "knocking" about the widespread adoption of mail in paper ballots? They simply offer no protection against vote coercion which is not a good choice in any election of importance. Pretty sure at least one of the two parties has ending mail-in voting as a long-held position.

At the least, this will often result in heads of household voting for their entire families. At the most, it can result in people voting under the supervision of a local gang/militia member.

If anyone is looking for the right terminology to find papers, it's "no-receipt" voting. The holy grail is no-receipt, yet verifiable voting, but it might be mathematically impossible.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#37

Post by ncr100 »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

The goal of a voting system is not verifiability, but trust. Without trust elections have no legitimacy.

An image illustrating why this (Belenios) approach is trustworthy could go a long way for many people. Images are a powerful tool for internalizing ideas.

I took a (lazy) crack at generating an image from a (could be 120% incorrect) ChatGPT conversation, FYI:

* IMAGE https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/png/RLAzJiD03DxlAQnECF023A... (ChatGPT's images look bad)

* CONVERSATION https://chatgpt.com/share/142a2eca-1f66-4087-9568-cbf49e7c3c...

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#38

Post by breuleux »

BSDobelix wrote: post #30
breuleux wrote: post #23

Voting is a deeply flawed decision making process compared to deliberation. If there are too many stakeholders for direct deliberation to scale, it is better to just pick a random sample of them and have them deliberate. You can have the sample vote afterwards to get the final result if they can't come to an agreement, but then you don't need fancy tech to check or tally the votes, you just need a room.

>you just need a room. I know Switzerland is small but still to big to put us all in a room, also who decides who the "random sample" is? People from Cities, Land? French speaking or German? Voting is the the only provable and fair decision making, however the pre-vote-training of the voters (aka marketing, media and money) is the big problem for me.

What do you mean, who decides? Verifiably picking a random sample isn't technically difficult, you give everyone an ID, pick a known PRNG algorithm, publish a seed, let anyone send in a salt in public if they want to, and then anyone can run the whole selection process.

> the pre-vote-training of the voters (aka marketing, media and money) is the big problem for me.

It's not merely that. These are very complicated matters that take time and energy to understand, and voters don't have the necessary time and resources to dedicate. Voters are also asked to vote for people they cannot directly talk to. Everything has to be done through intermediaries and middlemen, because direct communication doesn't scale. That's why picking a smaller sample is interesting: if you pick a hundred people at random, you can pay them to simply think and talk to each other, and you can reduce (although not completely eliminate) the influence of marketing, media and money.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#39

Post by baggy_trough »

evantbyrne wrote: post #21
throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

The goal of a voting system is not verifiability, but trust. Without trust elections have no legitimacy.

Trust is a social challenge, not a technological one. It is effectively impossible to stuff ballot boxes at scale in the US, but a large number of people still believe the last presidential election was stolen.

Why do you believe so?

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#40

Post by schroeding »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #25

As usual, good old fashioned pen and paper is worlds better than this or any other attempt by overzealous tech people with a hammer looking to hit this particular nail.

Agreed, the classic process also requires no trust into something technical (which, to most people, is equal to magic - hell, even as a CS major it's non-trivial to understand this), but only trusting ten-thousands of your fellow citizens with very different political affiliations, keeping each other in check. Easy to understand, easy to implement, easy to be a part of.
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