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USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

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

#111

Post by hoorayimhelping »

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…

>Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?

Yes. You are literally the only person who holds an extremely popular, prevalent, and often repeated opinion on the internet and in tech circles. Thank you for your bravery and insight.

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

#112

Post by jadyoyster »

Beldin wrote: post #110
enaaem wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan has the best way of counting votes. Ballot is hold in the air, the name is called out and someone in the back keeps the score. Everyone can see what is going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw

That is a great way to elect the one who buys the most votes. If you want to avoid such shenanigans, you'll need to enforce voter privacy.

The vote is private but the counting is public.

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

#113

Post by zdkl »

NestedLoopGoBrr wrote: post #108
djaque wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at least in my circles nobody thinks electronic voting is a good idea. I think Tom Scott has the best argument: you can't build a system that requires you to have a PhD in computer science to fully understand why you should trust it. Every day people need to have faith in voting and not just because a group of experts say they should.

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.

Because the fact that the maths add up to allowing for planes to fly doesn't need to be understood to be accepted. On the other hand, the process of electing a representative from a group must be understood to not be contested or misrepresented.

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

#114

Post by Gwypaas »

kristopolous wrote: post #64
Ekaros wrote: post #54

What is wrong with in-person paper-ballots? They have worked for centuries. And continue to be the absolute best system from multiple criteria.

It's way too easy for the ruling party to put the thumb on the scale and That's what's actually been happening for centuries. These days it's ID laws where certain IDs are accepted and others aren't based on who is likely to have what. It's closing the places to acquire the ID in the areas that will vote against you It's closing the polling stations, putting them in inconvenient locations, reducing the number of mach…

That's only issues because you choose them to be issues since there's no central constitutionally guaranteed process.

Most first-world countries simply require a polling location with certain number of booths per X people, require the maximum distance to one be Y kilometers which makes voting go swiftly. I've never waited in line to vote. Place elections on Sundays and ID's are already ubiquitous because you need them to function in modern societies. Like, I want to show my ID and then see my name be crossed of the list. It gives me the feeling of doing my part of upholding the integrity of the process.

The whole election is public, you can observe the polling locations and count. Just show up. This is mostly done by the political parties and watchdog groups.

Due to the size of the locations the first count is done a couple of hours after the election closes and the result is published the same evening.

We also simplified the process even more to allow you to vote up to 18 days advance of the election day at any place in the country. If you then decide to change your vote you can go to your polling location on the election day and the advance vote is thrown out.

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

#115

Post by ChrisLomont »

pgt wrote: post #56
lalaland1125 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This setup seems mostly pointless to me. Instead of publishing the product, why not just list the primes themselves? Both should be roughly equivalent and just publishing the list of primes would be simpler. And then once you do that, why even use prime numbers? Just assign unique tokens to voters. What exact security garantee are you trying to provide that wouldn't also be satisfied by just giving each voter a token…

It can be verified with a pencil and piece of paper and a calculator, so anybody can do it. As long as you agree about the number of sequential primes issued, you can calculate how many votes are still outstanding and keep voting booths open until 99% has voted. By issuing ranges of primes to states, you know where you have to keep booths open.

> t can be verified with a pencil and piece of paper and a calculator, so anybody can do it.

The size of the resulting number would be so incredibly large that no person with pencil and paper and calculator would have even the tiniest chance of being able to verify their number. The chance of even copying it down correctly once would be tiny. The number of pages to write it out is huge. The time for a person to check it by your method would require more than their lifetime.

Thus nobody, not a single human, could check it by your method.

This is a non-idea.

For the math inclined, the nth prime is around n ln n. We need ~130,000,000 of them. Each side will multiply ~half of them. The resulting number is ~(10^9)^(10^9), which has 10^10 digits. Writing one step of the calculation at 5 digits per second would take 62 years.

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

#116

Post by Beldin »

NestedLoopGoBrr wrote: post #108
djaque wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at least in my circles nobody thinks electronic voting is a good idea. I think Tom Scott has the best argument: you can't build a system that requires you to have a PhD in computer science to fully understand why you should trust it. Every day people need to have faith in voting and not just because a group of experts say they should.

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.

But people do have to understand at least at a high level why the announced result matches what the voters put in. The whole point of a voting system is not to pick a winner, but convincingly show that the loser(s) lost.

Undermining trust in the voting system is an old trick. Unless the voting system can show such allegations to be wrong, its results will remain disputed.

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

#117

Post by naveen99 »

xorcist wrote: post #106
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…

> This is a ridiculous argument, It is most certainly not. It is the reason voter secrecy in considered a cornerstone of a legitimate public vote. There are whole organizations, like the OSCE Election Observation, who audit these sort of things internationally. > it could just as well apply to mail-in voting It does, very much so. Every mail-in voting has to take this into account. Any introductory political science…

Why encourage different amounts of electronic voting than mail in paper voting ?

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

#118

Post by Beldin »

jadyoyster wrote: post #112
Beldin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great way to elect the one who buys the most votes. If you want to avoid such shenanigans, you'll need to enforce voter privacy.

The vote is private but the counting is public.

I stand corrected.

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

#120

Post by violetyellow »

shrubble wrote: post #85

I never understood why voting remains such an issue. Why not have the credit card companies handle voting? The cost of a card with the chip is less than $2 isn't it? The card is swiped into a reader, the ballot is displayed on screen, choices are made and confirmed, a laser printer prints out a paper ballot which is dropped into a secure box. We would know within 1 hour of polls closing the accurate tally of every ra…

Suppose I'm a bad guy with Trump, I command the credit card company to issue 1 million fake cards with names which are passed away in last century. Ask my agents to sweep these cards and vote for me. How could you civilians prevent these things from happening?
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