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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

#191

Post by beaner »

revnode wrote: post #183
beaner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

The overwhelming majority of the population doesn't have the capacity to understand what you wrote or why that is true. Even the majority of those who understand why it may be true, cannot say for certain that it is true without inspecting the codebase and its operation. That's a major problem.

I mean, you could say the same thing about current electronic voting or even about how aggregate paper voting is counted behind the scenes. Those things involve some level of trust.

I don’t think what I wrote is that difficult to understand. I think you’re underestimating people when you say “the overwhelming majority of the people do not have the capacity to understand what you said.” Really? Not even the capacity to understand?

In any case, the trust involved for a blockchain-based voting system with pseudonymity is much less than the other systems, because they can be 3rd-party audited, or even open source. And that auditing only needs to happen once rather than for each local vote collection method.

Explaining to the end-user is just a matter of communication. That’s not a “major problem.” People don't need to know how a blockchain works just like they don't need to know how UPS works. They just need to know that they're able to place a vote anonymously and verify themselves later if they want to.

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

#192

Post by sgc »

beaner wrote: post #170
BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very important thing most people forget: If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop. > Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that. The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the coun…

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

Or if they are forced to reveal it under duress, or they choose to reveal it to get paid for the result, etc.

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

#193

Post by Ericson2314 »

dnpp123 wrote: post #155
Ericson2314 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average Joe doesn't want the nerds to pick the president. Also, don't forget it's a secret ballot, and we do not have any good database of people with public keys in this country. What the hell am I supposed to make of a ledger with 100s of million anonymous public keys? Surely I cannot claim that relates 1-1 with the choices of real people.

I'm definitely opposed to 'electronic' voting, but the problem you are describing is easily solvable with asymmetric cryptography. You'd have your private key on your 'voting card' (unsure how you call it in the US) with some pw and the machine would just scan it, ask your password. You just need the proof that someone having a private key associated with a public key on a public record has signed, not necessarily kn…

Right. It's not that anonymity is impossible, but that anonymity is one requirement we can remove and make the problem tractable again.

There may be other such "straws that broke the camels back", but IMO anonymity is one property that makes a cryptosystem far less intuitive even to me. It's the bridge I never advocate crossing unless people with more security knowledge than me go to great lengths to demonstrate otherwise.

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

#194

Post by BurningFrog »

beaner wrote: post #170
BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very important thing most people forget: If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop. > Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that. The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the coun…

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

> Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

Which means the owner can be forced to reveal their vote to a spouse/boss/warlord.

I could have been clearer that that is what I meant.

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

#195

Post by milkshakes »

beaner wrote: post #186
ses1984 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you stop reading right at the end of the part you quoted?

Yes, not sure how it's related.

if you can verify your vote after it has been counted, you can be induced by a third party to vote for a specific candidate

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

#196

Post by the_snooze »

koheripbal wrote: post #161
galkk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see, the problem is not that the vote can be altered, but that the vote can be bought and the fact that person voted in the right fashion could be verified by 3-rd party much more easily (screenshots/whatever). The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.

This is possible today anyway. People can take a picture of their ballot in the booth. Hell, with mail-in voting, you can literally go door-to-door and buy mail-in ballots.

>People can take a picture of their ballot in the booth.

This is insufficient. In-person paper voting allows the voter to toss out their marked ballot and get a fresh one. You can take a photo of your ballot, but it's hard to prove that's what you actually casted. Poll workers will tell you to put your camera away near the ballot box, to protect other voters' privacy as they submit their completed ballots.

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

#197

Post by cochne »

davisr wrote: post #178
BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very important thing most people forget: If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop. > Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that. The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the coun…

I'd never want electronic voting either, but this myth needs to die. Intimidation can happen with absentee voting too, so it's not a valid concern.

Does it apply at the same level? I could see some ransomware that says if your vote doesn’t appear on the blockchain you are not getting your files back. Meanwhile to achieve intimidation with absentee voting, wouldn’t you have to check the physical ballot in person?

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

#198

Post by dragonwriter »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #182
sebmellen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. Not sure this is really an argument against an electronic voting system. In fact, with a blockchain-based system, the vote could be held in "limbo" until the voter decides to cast it, or you could give the option of creating fake screenshots to deter anyone "buying votes". You can't do this with a…

>In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it. If that doesn't show that remote voting is vulnerable I don't know what does...

The only reason for a big mail-in election is a historic exploit of an availability vulnerability of our in-person voting system, that it depends on lots and lots of (in practice, mostly older) people willing to spend a day in close contact with each other and other people for almost no pay.

> And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it.

Or at least miming one, perhaps to provide political cover for Republican-governed swing state legislatures, seeing the problems of in-person voting in the pandemic and armed with the telegraphed disruption of vote by mail as cover and polling data as motivation, to simply exercise their prerogative to cancel public voting and assign a set of Presidential electors without it, which the Republican control of the Senate can guarantee withstand any challenge in the electoral vote count.

If he really wanted electoral chaos by disrupting vote-by-mail, there'd by no reason to telegraph it; the reason to telegraph it is because he desires a response that it either provokes or justifies, as much, more than, or perhaps even instead of the disruption itself.

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

#199

Post by nathias »

djaque wrote: post #103
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…

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.

that's a luddite argument, it can apply equally to everything that requires trust

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

#200

Post by atlgator »

It's the illusion of safety. There is no facility for identity verification baked into blockchain. You have integrity for the data allowed on the chain but if you let Russian hackers write to it, it undermines the whole thing. Personally I'd rather go with a PKI system that offers non-repudiation.
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