161–170 of 307 posts
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You literally have video evidence from 2020 of people driving up with their cars and shoving 100+ ballots into absentee boxes; and you wrote the above with a straight face?
No, I haven’t seen evidence of that, and a quick googling for “2020 us ballot stuffing” doesn’t show me such
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You don't think this is even more pronounced if the criminals can keep af gun to your head in your own home when voting? That said - I am yet to see any protocol that is resilient against not showing up IRL (due to the exact reason above).
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.
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Not really, one of the goals in contradictory to the stated goal of an electronic voting system of voter verifiability. The problem is that when you can verify that your own vote has been counted a certain way, that can be used to influence the vote. $100 Amazon gift card if you verify that you have voted Purple. Lack of verifiability has been a feature to prevent a voter from willingly participating in manipulation.
One way to achieve verifiability is through deniable tracking numbers computed locally in network-disconnected devices. To ensure that they are deniable, they can only be computed after all tracking numbers along the votes are made publically available, which can be realised by publishing a secret code that the voter inputs into the device. That way, when the coercer/briber asks for a vote to be cast in a certain way…
Sure you can generate all these secret codes but then why wouldn't a briber ask for you to take a picture or video of the screen with all the codes and secret? OCR and computer vision is quite good nowadays and most people are carrying a video camera in their pocket, so the process can potentially be scaled. Bonus points if its install the Purple App and ask the voter to point their camera at the screen with all the codes. Double bonus points if the app generates a nice easy password for the used to plug in to be used as your secret.
And the thing is that it doesn't need to be super accurate. Even if its only budgeted with $10 million worth of $100 gift cards and it's only about 70% of the cards were getting the desired outcome, that's still 70,000 votes going purple. Especially if you limit it to being the first 100,000 confirmed voters, you'll still get people participating if they think there is still hope for getting a card. Even more if you're convincing voters that are only voting for the sake of a gift card and don't actually care about the result of the election.
And ultimately that's just one of several attack vectors I can think of. And I'm not a smart person; I'd go as far to say that I'm actually pretty stupid. I can't imagine what a room full of actually smart folks with NSA-like budget and NSA-like permissions can come up with. Remember the gigantic mess with Dual_EC_DRBG in the FIPS 140-2 standard?
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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
> It's enough for the average voter to trust that some other people - independent experts - are able to verify the vote. I don't agree. This is plausible within a coesive electorate, but it feels like moving the problem. What guarantees that the experts are trusted by the voters? And more importantly, assuming that at some point the system (experts) is trusted, how is the trust in the voting system retained over time…
There will still be questions around compromised keys/secrets
I suppose in this case paper ballots win
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I think these are technically interesting systems, but "trust" really is the goal. "Verifiability" doesn't necessarily imply "trust," especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo. A voting system should be something voters and poll workers (i.e., local volunteers) can understand.
> especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details. Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then…
Credit card via HTTPS has a second layer to it though, the accountings/auditing layer. You can't achieve that with secret ballot voting without throwing out the secret part.
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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
Yes, but then all that's needed to attack the voting system is to trot out your own experts that voice disagreement. Without the means to assess the system for themselves, voters will lose trust in it. Especially in this day and age, when trust in institutions and expects in general is extremely low. (Heck, this attack already works to some extent with the current, extremely transparent system of ballots)
Exactly, so the rest of your criticism isn't nearly as strong, if it applies to all means of voting.
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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
As a software developer myself, if an "independent expert" comes out and says that some software system is fully verified, I might trust their allegiance, but I probably won't trust their competence. I wouldn't expect the general population to trust them either.
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You don't think this is even more pronounced if the criminals can keep af gun to your head in your own home when voting? That said - I am yet to see any protocol that is resilient against not showing up IRL (due to the exact reason above).
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.
A few years ago, some of the local county majors know that people liked them more than the candidate to governor or president of the same party. So they send helpers to each house to ask people and give them cut ballots with the combination they liked. No judgement. People can choose whoever they want. The county majors know it was better for them in average.
So it's possible to scale it if you distribute the task.
We have in person secret voting. So people can lie and accept the ballots provided by the helpers of the local major and then just pick another when voting. If people can vote remotely, they can be forced to vote under supervision.
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…