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Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

belenios.org

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Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#131

Post by throwaway48476 »

dmurray wrote: post #124
throwaway48476 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm far more familiar with cryptography concepts than the average person but I wouldn't trust myself to audit a crypto system or implementation.

You might trust yourself to read a bunch of blog posts on technical deep dives into the system and make up your mind based on that, though. (Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know - perhaps you'd end up agreeing with whichever side has the most believable technological shibboleths, which isn't that much different from the current best practice of listening to the side with the better attack ads).

No, I'm aware of my limitations. Reading about how the system 'should' work does nothing to instill confidence that the implementation is correct or that there are no design flaws.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#132

Post by kylewatson »

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 website says that your vote is last-write-wins. I think the idea is I could sell my vote and vote for A, then later re-vote for B. Since you can't trust that I won't just re-vote it won't be worth paying for.

But if you held a gun to my head and made me vote at 18:59, with polls closing at 19:00, then I guess it would work. Hell, if you held a gun to my head and had me vote a week early and then blew my brains out, that would probably also keep me from voting again.

So it's not complete, but neither is the current system. You could hold a gun to my loved-ones head and tell me to go vote for B in our current system. I could photograph the ballot from the box, cellphones are small these days. Or if I vote by mail I could easily prove to you I voted for B so you would let the hostage free.

So I guess it actually is an improvement over the status quo.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#133

Post by mariusor »

jltsiren wrote: post #116
mariusor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that stamp and paper ballots are actually hampering the democratic process. There are many downsides of physical ballots: the need to physically be at one location, having to set aside a day to vote, lack of interest for younger demographics... all of these could go away with a good electronic ballot. The more people can vote, the better the democratic process will be. Making it easier for _everyone_ to vote…

> having to set aside a day to vote That only happens if the people in charge of the elections are enemies of democracy. It also means that the results are being manipulated and not particularly legitimate. The election day is obviously a public holiday. There are plenty of polling locations, so you never have to go far to vote, unless you live in a particularly remote rural area. And because there are enough polling…

I don't know where you're voting from, but most of my adult life I had long queues to wait in - granted I was an expat crowding an embassy's corridor - and even if I don't have to work that day, I can think of better things that I could do with my time than that. And it's not all about me or you, it's about all the people that do have to take a day off even if it's a holiday, and the people that don't live next to a polling location, and about the people that are on vacation and need to vote in a train station or air port. There are always people inconvenienced by the act of physically going to a ballot station. Electronic voting would help them.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#134

Post by oivey »

codesnik wrote: post #126
oivey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals showing up to your house, putting a gun to your head, and demanding your vote is a fantasy. You don’t need to defend against it because it’s a totally unscalable way to steal an election.

happened in annexed parts of Ukraine during "referendum"

Source on that? That was a crooked vote, but it doesn’t really make sense for the Russians to send people door-to-door threatening people to send in coerced absentee ballots.

I assume they instead did the more normal things of local voter intimidation, outright not counting, and lying. If your government doesn’t want to follow democracy you’re fucked either way. No need for armed gunman to make you vote at gunpoint.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#135

Post by Modified3019 »

codesnik wrote: post #126
oivey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals showing up to your house, putting a gun to your head, and demanding your vote is a fantasy. You don’t need to defend against it because it’s a totally unscalable way to steal an election.

happened in annexed parts of Ukraine during "referendum"

I get what you’re saying, but that’s not really relevant.

That was political theatre being made in a conquered territory, not an actual attempt at democracy. It’s like pondering the specifics of a vehicle’s engine performance/efficiency after it’s been hit by a fucking train.

There was/is no solution to fix voting problems in Russian held territory other than to violently force Russian thugs to leave.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#136

Post by baobabKoodaa »

atoav wrote: post #119

One important thing about any voting system – digital or not – is that it has to be good at producing agreeable consent . That means bitter, betrayed and hurt (but reasonable/democratic!) losing parties need to be able to say: yeah we accept the result because we are confident in the outcome of the election. This is something all digital systems are really bad at, even if everything is readable and verifiable, unless…

Disagree. It's enough for the average voter to trust that some other people - independent experts - are able to verify the vote. Not everyone needs to be an expert at anything. I wrote more about this trust aspect in the appendix of my thesis on voting: https://attejuvonen.fi/thesis

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#137

Post by baobabKoodaa »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

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

If I had to choose between a broadly trusted voting system which has been secretly compromised by a hostile state actor, or a not-broadly-trusted verifiable voting system, I would choose the verifiable voting system any day.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#138

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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.

There are some voting schemes which protect against vote selling and coercion: https://attejuvonen.fi/thesis

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#139

Post by baobabKoodaa »

sylware wrote: post #13

Nothing will beat the paper with physical verification/monitoring of people from different parties with the details of the end results properly published for everybody to double check. The only way to trust voting machines (which could be rigged before delivery), would be to physically watch which buttons the voters did press, and manually account it... which would violate the core rule of anonymity, that to avoid re…

There are various methods to trust voting machines. The simplest example is a machine which immediately prints out a paper trail that the voter verifies.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#140

Post by baobabKoodaa »

mariusor wrote: post #71
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.

I think that stamp and paper ballots are actually hampering the democratic process. There are many downsides of physical ballots: the need to physically be at one location, having to set aside a day to vote, lack of interest for younger demographics... all of these could go away with a good electronic ballot. The more people can vote, the better the democratic process will be. Making it easier for _everyone_ to vote…

Convenience over security. I don't like that.

The #1 goal of a voting system should be to prevent a hostile state from secretly hijacking your elections.

How convenient voting is can make a difference between 57% voter turnout versus 62% voter turnout. That's largely irrelevant.

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