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Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

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Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#301

Post by JanisErdmanis »

codedokode wrote: post #297
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attack vector is no different with paper ballots.

With paper voting you need both fake IDs and people. You need to recruit people ready to commit a crime, and transport them between polling stations. If you want to add million fake votes, you need somewhere about 100 000 accomplices, each voting 10 times. For comparison, with electronic voting to commit fraud, you need just one patriotic or corrupt system administrator willing to protect the country from an undesira…

> For comparison, with electronic voting to commit fraud, you need just one patriotic or corrupt system administrator willing to protect the country from an undesirable candidate. It is not difficult to find such type of person.

The difference between having a passport or a national-issued digital identity card that has a private key inside is not much different. In passports, there are different security mechanisms in place that make it hard for an adversary to fake them. For digital identity cards, similar mechanisms exist so that their issuance does not depend on a single entity. The full list for which the identity cards are issued can be audited by sampling and finding follow-ups to see if the issued identity is owned by the claimed legitimate person and is independent, whether the thing is a passport or an identity card. Although, I don't know whether such checks are actually being done in practice. The security of digital identity is being assured with an increasing variety of documents that can be signed digitally using such government-issued cards.

Afterwards, when we have a list of public keys that are eligible to participate in the vote, E2E verifiable evidence prevents any involved party or coalition from deceiving the public with a manipulated election tally, as that would not produce valid cryptographic proof.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#302

Post by codedokode »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #301
codedokode wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With paper voting you need both fake IDs and people. You need to recruit people ready to commit a crime, and transport them between polling stations. If you want to add million fake votes, you need somewhere about 100 000 accomplices, each voting 10 times. For comparison, with electronic voting to commit fraud, you need just one patriotic or corrupt system administrator willing to protect the country from an undesira…

> For comparison, with electronic voting to commit fraud, you need just one patriotic or corrupt system administrator willing to protect the country from an undesirable candidate. It is not difficult to find such type of person. The difference between having a passport or a national-issued digital identity card that has a private key inside is not much different. In passports, there are different security mechanisms…

The list of eligible voters might be not published to protect personal identifiable information and to prevent misuse of such information (in my country it is not published). Therefore you cannot sample anything.

And even if you could, you see a name you never heard of, so how do you check whether it is a real person or not? Without having access to government databases.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#303

Post by JanisErdmanis »

codedokode wrote: post #302
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For comparison, with electronic voting to commit fraud, you need just one patriotic or corrupt system administrator willing to protect the country from an undesirable candidate. It is not difficult to find such type of person. The difference between having a passport or a national-issued digital identity card that has a private key inside is not much different. In passports, there are different security mechanisms…

The list of eligible voters might be not published to protect personal identifiable information and to prevent misuse of such information (in my country it is not published). Therefore you cannot sample anything. And even if you could, you see a name you never heard of, so how do you check whether it is a real person or not? Without having access to government databases.

> The list of eligible voters might be not published to protect personal identifiable information and to prevent misuse of such information (in my country it is not published). Therefore you cannot sample anything.

Trusted third-party auditors can have such access without linking the public key to a person's identity. They can also access government databases on a sample basis. This is no different than linking the passport serial number to the person's identity.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#304

Post by gloosx »

a2128 wrote: post #293
gloosx wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so? It would calculate the hash, and to reverse it back to the original DNA is an irrationally expensive computation. On top of that, voter simply putting a random seed phrase for doing another 650000 pbkdf2 iterations would take this task to close to level impossible – at the same time the ballot itself will remain verifiable by the original voter.

The thing about secret voting is that you want to make it impossible to verify that a particular person voted for a particular party. Otherwise it becomes possible to threaten people with violence if they don't show confirmation that they voted for the correct party, it also becomes possible to pay people $1000 if they can show confirmation of voting for the other party, people may start using the confirmation as a s…

Why would you ever want to make it impossible to verify that your vote really went for a particular party, you should just trust it blindly or what? It should be completely opposite of that in my opinion. It is impossible to prevent people from showing confirmation of voting for another party, since they are alone in the booth and they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof. Paying 1000$ for voting is a problem for tax institution not the election. There will always be a way to reimburse anyone for voting, but it comes with a risk since it is unlawful. In a true direct democracy system all votes are public, and looking at the wealth and wellbeing of countries which adopted such a system – I firmly believe it is a better one.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#305

Post by BSDobelix »

breuleux wrote: post #38
BSDobelix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ma…

>random sample isn't technically difficult, you give everyone an ID

Have you ever had a gummy bear package with nearly just green bears in it?

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#306

Post by a2128 »

gloosx wrote: post #304
a2128 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about secret voting is that you want to make it impossible to verify that a particular person voted for a particular party. Otherwise it becomes possible to threaten people with violence if they don't show confirmation that they voted for the correct party, it also becomes possible to pay people $1000 if they can show confirmation of voting for the other party, people may start using the confirmation as a s…

Why would you ever want to make it impossible to verify that your vote really went for a particular party, you should just trust it blindly or what? It should be completely opposite of that in my opinion. It is impossible to prevent people from showing confirmation of voting for another party, since they are alone in the booth and they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof. Payi…

Why? It's the norm in pretty much every country when it comes to making decisions at the national level. If secret voting is not ensured and there's a standard way to verify anybody's vote with 100% certainty, there will be employers firing people for voting for a particular candidate, there will be discounts/freebies for people who voted for a particular candidate, there will be violence and ostracism, celebrities and company executives will be harassed to justify their voting decisions, and all of this WILL pressure everyone's voting decisions (or the decision to not vote, to try to avoid being politicized), so it's not just a problem for the tax institution or police, it becomes a problem of elections fundamentally no longer being free or fair. For this reason we have the secret ballot, and documented election processes to ensure they can overall be trusted despite individual votes being kept secret.

"they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof"

Apart from the fact some jurisdictions (such as UK) will discard your vote for writing codes on the ballot, there are a million ways to photoshop or fake a ballot selfie some other way, there's no standard way to be 100% certain how anybody voted.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#307

Post by gloosx »

a2128 wrote: post #306
gloosx wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever want to make it impossible to verify that your vote really went for a particular party, you should just trust it blindly or what? It should be completely opposite of that in my opinion. It is impossible to prevent people from showing confirmation of voting for another party, since they are alone in the booth and they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof. Payi…

Why? It's the norm in pretty much every country when it comes to making decisions at the national level. If secret voting is not ensured and there's a standard way to verify anybody's vote with 100% certainty, there will be employers firing people for voting for a particular candidate, there will be discounts/freebies for people who voted for a particular candidate, there will be violence and ostracism, celebrities a…

Fun fact, you don't even need to write anything on the ballot if you are in the UK, since every one of these has a unique number already, and every voter has a number which is printed down on the counterfoil of the ballot paper automatically. Secrecy of the ballot is not guaranteed in the UK, as officials do have access to the counterfoil and can determine how individual electors have voted. Even some US states require the ability to link ballots to voters, and it doesn't make these elections fundamentally non-free or unfair. People are fundamentally non-free to this day, nor will be free any elections they participate in, as long pseudo ballot secrecy is required to protect them from violence and graft and as long as they have no comtetence, knowledge and confidence in expressing and discussing their political decisions publicly.
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