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Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#171

Post by heavenlyblue »

afiori wrote: post #167
heavenlyblue wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that happens digitally (and using correctly distributed crypto signatures), then we can provide the public with the necessary tools to check every single vote.

> and using correctly distributed crypto signatures you sort of lost me here. I will not say it is a bad idea, but it would never work in any country I know. Thee sheer size and cultural innovation required would still need to place an inordinate amount of trust in the system. Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain (IIRC Estonia has a nice program where you…

>> you sort of lost me here. I will not say it is a bad idea, but it would never work in any country I know.

Bitcoin works this way though. It is a set of tools to manipulate a highly abstract data structure. These tools are developed by a minority of the population, but the rest of the population trusts them.

This works because it has value for the folk.

Now you're speaking about elections. Most of the people speaking of e-elections are _mostly_ trying to get to the public that if you could make the elections work electronically - then there's a bunch of other things that could be done digitally too.

One example - company board voting. What if you could be present at any board meeting because everything that is said over there is cryptographically signed by each party thus providing non-repudiation of whatever they said?

What if every newspaper reporter had to sign their articles with their signature which is linked to a news trust network?

Contract signatures. Inheritance.

This is a reply to your:

>> Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain

Little gain is only for people who have no idea of what you can do with "digital".

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#172

Post by laughinghan »

abathur wrote: post #169
laughinghan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, currently, it's public whether someone voted (though of course not what their vote was). Assuming that's still true in this fancy system, that count would then have to match the count of how many encrypted votes there are, so you can't forge fake ballots from whole cloth (without people noticing). The best you could do is to try to defraud both systems, by identifying who won't vote and then submitting a fake v…

Good point; I wasn't factoring in the existing public voting records. I'm not sure what the contact rates would look like if you tried, but retroactive sampling should have a good chance of spotting systemic abuse if response rates are sufficiently high. I guess you could even legislate random audit sample sizes based on the number of votes and victory margins. I've been thinking about the values of end-to-end audita…

That does make sense; strong deterrence, and deterministic rather than probabilistic guarantees, are both better for legitimacy, probably.

I don't think there's any need to legislate random audit sample sizes; in practice, independent groups will do so. (And it's crucial to legitimacy that it's possible for independent groups to do so in the first place, of course.)

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#173

Post by abathur »

laughinghan wrote: post #172
abathur wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point; I wasn't factoring in the existing public voting records. I'm not sure what the contact rates would look like if you tried, but retroactive sampling should have a good chance of spotting systemic abuse if response rates are sufficiently high. I guess you could even legislate random audit sample sizes based on the number of votes and victory margins. I've been thinking about the values of end-to-end audita…

That does make sense; strong deterrence, and deterministic rather than probabilistic guarantees, are both better for legitimacy, probably. I don't think there's any need to legislate random audit sample sizes; in practice, independent groups will do so. (And it's crucial to legitimacy that it's possible for independent groups to do so in the first place, of course.)

Definitely shouldn't preclude independent audits.

Lazy thinking, on my part. The thought was that mandatory audits would help maintain long-term confidence by avoiding erosion of confidence in long gaps where no specific evidence triggered audits. Minimum sample sizes would help protect the mechanism from undersized propaganda-audits that ultimately undermine trust in the audits themselves.

But you're right; it would probably be easier and more pernicious to do a sufficiently large audit but give the reins to partisans, ideologues, or incompetents. Fairly open access would be better, thouguh I'm sure there are still plenty of "interested" outside parties willing to perform propaganda audits for cheap. Not sure how to solve that.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#174

Post by gfiorav »

kazagistar wrote: post #121
gfiorav wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also prevent uninterested, lazy, people from voting out of spite. I know it's unpopular to say, but I don't think it's a bad thing that voting requires personal (strictly personal; no corporation should get in your way) effort.

Because the amount of spare effort people have available is correlated to class, and thus adding more hoops to jump through is yet another way to favor the idle rich over the working poor. But I also don't see why the first sentence is inherently bad. Why is it good to police what type of people may vote? Why is it good to police the reason for voting?

I just feel that spiteful voting is damaging and a recent abuse of the confidence in the voter to do what’s right for 4 years.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#175

Post by gfiorav »

ccffph wrote: post #104
gfiorav wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also prevent uninterested, lazy, people from voting out of spite. I know it's unpopular to say, but I don't think it's a bad thing that voting requires personal (strictly personal; no corporation should get in your way) effort.

I agree. I never understood the notion of same-day registration, nor the constant blasting of voting reminders for months before the midterms. Do we really want people who have to be extremely convinced to vote, to vote? Do we really want people who didn't care at all, got convinced by one team the day of, and decided to vote on a whim, to vote? Thus, are the votes from people who had to be reminded on twitter and go…

Yeah... all the talk of emotion-driven-politics makes me dizzy. Politics should be boring (if everything is ok)

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#176

Post by laughinghan »

abathur wrote: post #173
laughinghan wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does make sense; strong deterrence, and deterministic rather than probabilistic guarantees, are both better for legitimacy, probably. I don't think there's any need to legislate random audit sample sizes; in practice, independent groups will do so. (And it's crucial to legitimacy that it's possible for independent groups to do so in the first place, of course.)

Definitely shouldn't preclude independent audits. Lazy thinking, on my part. The thought was that mandatory audits would help maintain long-term confidence by avoiding erosion of confidence in long gaps where no specific evidence triggered audits. Minimum sample sizes would help protect the mechanism from undersized propaganda-audits that ultimately undermine trust in the audits themselves. But you're right; it would…

Hmmmm, I guess the key is that each group's auditing process itself has to be open and "objective"---paper ballots are pretty easy in this regard, every group looking at the same ballot will usually agree who the vote is for. Math/encryption could possibly work too, at least in the sense of being "objective", although it has other legitimacy problems due to being difficult for lay people to understand and trust.

As far as I know, controversies over audits or the independent observers themselves being corrupted aren't really a problem in the US at least, so I'm not too worried about this.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#177

Post by bumby »

PyroLagus wrote: post #170
bumby wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to clarify. So if I understand this correctly, the system can allow an individual to verify that their vote was counted but not validate that the vote was counted correctly? From that perspective, it seems analogous to the system in use but perhaps more efficient. In other words, does this actually introduce any new features or just translate the existing features of the current system t…

> the system can allow an individual to verify that their vote was counted but not validate that the vote was counted correctly > does this actually introduce any new features Well, the current system doesn't allow you to verify that your vote was counted, so that's what it adds.

In the U.S. there's a ledger in the current system that provides verification.
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