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DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

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Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#181

Post by jacques_chester »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #136
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want a secret voting system such that the voter can’t access their own history, then just do not offer the password option. Instead a unique private key is generated, but never distributed to the voter or any other party. - Key: Encrypted SSN - Value: Unencrypted Vote

However, I’d personally prefer a system that was fully public. Problems: Social Pressure, Violent/Non-Violent Coercion, Retaliation. Coercion could be a problem but with enough humans seems unlikely to be effective without the details of the conspiring entity to leak. If here are 10 jurors or a few judges coercion matters because it is easy to cover up. Coercion at scale has never occurred. Coercing any double digit…

The ballot was not always secret.

It was made secret because all the problems you say aren't important, were very important.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#182

Post by jacques_chester »

zepolen wrote: post #175
snowwrestler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, you put a gun to my head and tell me to vote for Hillary. I go into the ballot box and vote for Trump. I come out and you ask me if I voted Hillary. I say yes, I voted for Hillary, of course. If there is no possible way for you or me to know (edit: prove) if I'm telling the truth, how is that worth your time and energy? It's not. The benefit of a secret ballot is that it greatly reduces, if not removes, the incen…

This is how it actually works: 1. Mobster goes in to vote but doesn't put it in the box - he takes the blank ballot paper outside with him. 2. He fills the vote on the ballot and gives it to the coerced voter 1. He expects a blank ballot back, or else. He has his goons watching the voter throw the real ballot in the box, or else. 3. Using the new blank ballot he goes to coerced voter 2, and the cycle continues. Of co…

This scheme is prevented by having scrutineers appointed by multiple candidates. Australia does this and it works well.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#183

Post by odyssey7 »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #75
nathan_long wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I don't think that's dismissive at all. That's what it is, and it sounds good to me. Basically the computer is a scribe with perfect handwriting that fills out the paper ballot for the voter while the voter watches. Absolutely any voter is qualified to assert whether the ballot contains the votes they intended to…

This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have: 1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign agains…

These might be good arguments for letting people fill the ballot in manually, if they wish. Based on the design as I understand it, it seems like users aren't prohibited from printing a blank ballot and taking a pen to it themselves.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#184

Post by zepolen »

jedberg wrote: post #71
swalsh wrote: post #4

My ideal voting system would allow me to have a real time feed of votes as they come in, so that at the end of the night I can check my records vs the "official" records. Names can be detached, all I need is a Ballot id. BallotId can be something as simple as the hash of RegisteredVoterId + password + Salt + ElectionId. As long as the voter remembers their password, they can look up their record, and the record can b…

The problem with any voting system that allows you to verify the vote after the fact is that it makes it too easy to coerce someone to vote a certain way. I can promise you money (or threaten you with violence) to vote a certain way, but you can't follow me into the booth, and no matter how you make me "verify" I can always change the vote between verification and depositing it in the box. If there is a way to verify…

Using 'something you know' it's possible to both verify how your vote went and at the same time not allow someone else to know, even if forced.

A simple example would be assigning a random color to each option per person. So blue means Trump for you. Hilary for someone else.

You only need to get people into a booth once, to learn which color is which option.

From there on in, verification is as simple as looking at the color to make sure it's correct. No one else can be sure what the color means.

Same principle can be done on multiple votes, though information will leak. So if you're coerced more than once you'd need to regenerate your colors. So while this solution stops the 'violence' coercion it won't stop 'sale' coercion.

Also the other problem is people will write their colors down or forget them - which is why as you say verification after the fact causes way too many problems.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#185

Post by piker »

masswerk wrote: post #16
abakker wrote: post #3

>The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch. I guess the devil is always in the details. "freely adopt and customize" to me says that the code will not be veri…

Isn't there a law in the US prohibiting public institutions from competing with private businesses? This may provide a cause for not rolling it out, but rather handing it over to private enterprises for implementation. Edit: I recall the US having to withdraw from the Human Genome Project because of this as soon as a private enterprise claimed it as a field of business.

Yes, kind of. US Tax-Exempt entities directly engaged in "unrelated business activites" can be subject to "unrelated business income tax" or UBIT at the federal level. But that's unlikely to deter an agency of the federal government which would not be subject to UBIT.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#186

Post by joveian »

macintux wrote: post #126
bdamm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When thinking about voting by mail I wouldn't consider North Carolina's system as exemplar, since it is still primarily a polling-place election. Instead, look towards Washington, Oregon, and Colorado which are states where elections are entirely by mail. Evidence of coercion or fraud is low, and engagement is high.

How do we know how many spouses are (or simply feel) compelled to vote a certain way? I’m not saying fraud is rampant, but there’s no denying the fact that on the individual level fraud and coercion are much easier to achieve when voting is done outside the polling booth.

In many states it is possible to get an absentee ballot for any reason, which allows the same coersion potential but without the convenience of full vote by mail. Forcing voting in person also has a large effect on who actually votes (due to work or other issues getting in the way, which could also include coersion from a spouse who thought you might vote the wrong way or doesn't think you should be able to vote). Presumably people are checking if there are large swings in voting patterns when vote by mail is started that would indicate widespread coersion. Coersion can also be effective in practice even when the actual voting is done in secret.

I wouldn't recommend vote by mail for Mexico, where there is widespread vote buying even with secret ballots, but for the US it seems to me that vote by mail is likely to be more representative and increase the chance that voters will research the candidates as they are voting. No system is perfect so it is a question of what tradeoffs seem to make the most sense for particular situations.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#187

Post by jacques_chester »

MBCook wrote: post #64
anth_anm wrote: post #24

My design uses paper and pen. Deployment requires mailing ballots out and having places where people can come in to fill them out. 10 million dollars please.

How well does it work for people with motor disabilities? Vision disabilities? Does an X mean a choice or they crossed out their choice? What happens when the pens run out of ink? What if they can’t read English? Helpers? What do you pay them? Can they understand that dialect of that obscure language? Do you trust them not to lie about what they’re marking on the ballot for someone? The truth is electronic voting mac…

Australia scales pen and paper up to tens of millions of ballots cast in one day. These problems have all been solved before and don't need machines to introduce much worse ones.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#188

Post by jacques_chester »

LinuxBender wrote: post #87
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have there been any competitions to make an open source, highly scalable and verifiable anti-tampering voting system Yes, for thousands of years. The result is called the paper ballot. You cannot have a verifiable anti-tampering voting system using computers. You need verifiability by the general public. Auditing a microchip is not something members of the general public know how to do, and in any case, it detroys…

Are those tamper proof? I recall some engineers testifying before congress about specifically making paper ballot systems that were designed to allow altering results. DieBold I think? I don't have a link handy, but it seems that is just as fallible. Or do you mean hand written ballots? Does anyone still use those? And yeah, the digital ones have been hacked at DefCon by children. (their parents taught them how to ha…

> Does anyone still use those?

Most of the world's leading democracies.

The USA is actually the outlier.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#189

Post by zepolen »

jacques_chester wrote: post #182
zepolen wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it actually works: 1. Mobster goes in to vote but doesn't put it in the box - he takes the blank ballot paper outside with him. 2. He fills the vote on the ballot and gives it to the coerced voter 1. He expects a blank ballot back, or else. He has his goons watching the voter throw the real ballot in the box, or else. 3. Using the new blank ballot he goes to coerced voter 2, and the cycle continues. Of co…

This scheme is prevented by having scrutineers appointed by multiple candidates. Australia does this and it works well.

How would they stop that?

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#190

Post by jacques_chester »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #59
cyphar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> e-Voting could make it easier / cheaper to deploy polling stations, collect ballots faster, and potentially to use more complex (but more fair and accurate) voting methods like Ranked Choice or others. In Australia we use IRV (what you call ranked-choice) and we don't have any forms of electronic voting for federal elections, and the overwhelming majority of votes cast in state elections are paper ballots (which ar…

Your votes are still probably counted by a computer. In San Francisco, we use optical scan ballots. This system is very similar. It prints out a ballot that you validate and feed into an optical scan machine. Marking the ballot is electronic, which allows for more language choices, assistance for hearing impaired people, etc.

> Your votes are still probably counted by a computer.

They are not. The count is done thrice, by hand, under supervision by scrutineers appointed by candidates.

It works very well.

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