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Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

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Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#191

Post by codedokode »

SamBam wrote: post #7
peterhunt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said of mail in paper ballots too, which have seen widespread adoption in the United States starting in 2020, so I don’t think this should be a knock against this system.

How would you prove that you voted how you said you did? If you took a picture of your ballot, or even if you filmed yourself putting it in the envelope and putting it in the mailbox, there's nothing stopping you from taking it out later, tearing it up, and going to vote differently in person.

First, this is too much trouble and many won't do this, second, you can lie to people that you have the means to verify their vote, third, you might require a person to write a code word on the ballot so that you can verify that they actually casted that ballot.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#192

Post by illiac786 »

codedokode wrote: post #190
illiac786 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this only solves one problem: make a vote verifiable. It does not solve who is entitled to vote and how to identify this person – how could it? it’s different in every country. I do think it’s very useful though, it’s like one huge chunk of work done.

> It does not solve who is entitled to vote and how to identify this person Without this the whole system can be easily compromised.

as I said, it’s one block in the solution. A big one. Also, identifying individuals online is a totally different problem.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#193

Post by codedokode »

kylewatson wrote: post #132
tromp wrote: post #3

> Using the web interface, the voter enters her credential and selects her vote. Her computer then computes the ballot, which corresponds to the vote encrypted with the election public key. Like most (or all?) online protocols, this doesn't protect against vote selling or vote coercion.

The website says that your vote is last-write-wins. I think the idea is I could sell my vote and vote for A, then later re-vote for B. Since you can't trust that I won't just re-vote it won't be worth paying for. But if you held a gun to my head and made me vote at 18:59, with polls closing at 19:00, then I guess it would work. Hell, if you held a gun to my head and had me vote a week early and then blew my brains ou…

You don't need any guns here. Just call your employees and make them vote on their phone in your presense. Also lie that you have people able to see how they voted. Also give them some money so that they feel themselves as accomplice.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#194

Post by codedokode »

evantbyrne wrote: post #92
baggy_trough wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I am located, there are ballot boxes literally on the side of the road, and we have universal absentee balloting. Anyone who can acquire ballots, perhaps from non interested voters, or those who can be pressured, can submit ballots and there would be no feasible way to know. Election day, in person secret voting, with voter ID is the way.

The absentee voting process is still audited at every step. They even have observer areas in the ballot printing facilities now. How would a party ever subvert the process that exists to stuff ballots at any scale?

- those who print ballots can print some extra ballots in secret and put them in the box

- the ballots can be printed at non-monitored facility. I am sure FBI has such capabilities, there are many talented people

- those responsible for transporting ballots can "forget" some of them accidentally

- at polling stations where there are no election monitors, they can take as much ballots as they need

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#195

Post by codedokode »

mariusor wrote: post #67
trte9343r4 wrote: post #9

In reality private keys will be mailed in insecure envelopes, issued multiple times (just to be sure) or issued to people, who are not citizens, moved away or died.

I think this will be prevented when these private keys will be part of the national IDs, similar to how Estonia and other European countries do it. If there's a "national registry of citizens" comprised of public keys, I think it will be easy to organize ballots on top of that.

The government can issue fake IDs and vote in their name. Especially in countries where there are many migrants who receive citizenship, you can easily issue some extra IDs and nobody notices.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#197

Post by synecdoche »

mariusor wrote: post #59
tossandthrow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you need to ensure that the vote is given without anyone interfering.

I think a better measure against this is not physical presence, but allowing one individual to exercise their vote any number of times until the ballot period ends. This means that a malevolent entity that wants to influence votes needs to sequester the voter(s) for the whole ballot period, which is vastly more difficult than putting a gun to someone's head for a single vote. Executing this at scale so the effect can…

This relies on the voter to have enough autonomy to be able to independently access their online ID. It would be easy to circumvent by separating the voter from their ability to identify themselves online. Either by keeping their means of identication from them during the voting period or by being the gatekeeper to the computer where their online ID is stored, for example with a password.

It also relies on the voter caring enough about their vote in the first place to be willing to attempt to do it, with whatever possible personal risk that entails.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#198

Post by atoav »

illiac786 wrote: post #183
atoav wrote: post #119

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…

It’s a simple trust problem. No one is counting all ballots in the entire country, they trust others to do so, and do so in a truthful manner. Same for machines, they’ll have to trust that some people did their job and checked these machines. Not saying this will happen any time soon though ;)

One question: How would a machine have to look that you use in a high stakes process, that someone else (potentially your adversary) purchases and setups and that you and the majority of the electorate can be able to trust?

Elections with paper ballots are somewhat straightforward in that regard. Any party member that doesn't trust the process can literally apply to check part of it and be able to see for themselves that there is nothing fishy going on in the part they checked. And they can do that with nearly no prior expertise. If they don't get to check it for themselves they can trust that enough people like them are envolved in the process that someone would collect evidence of wrongdoing if it happened. And these people are normal people and many, so bribing them doesn't make sense. Adversaries that want to make that election untrustworthy would have to insert so many people at so many steps and at such number, an attack against it quickly becomes impractical.

Not with a computer system, I am not even sure if I would trust a system that I myself setup and software that I myself had written if used in a high stakes election. But the few experts that are able to verify the process and have the computer knowledge to do so without naive optimism now are high stakes targets and each party now needs to have one at each polling station at some point after which the machines (air gapped?) need to be completely isolated unless you want that verification to become meaningless. The voter now needs to trust the expert and for a hint about how well that works I want to point you to the Covid pandemic.

So digital voting is a non-trivial problem to solve, especially for high stakes, anonymous, but transparent elections. And we computer people can't just hand-wave the doubts away, you need to address each attack vector a major nation state attacker could/would exploit. And even if we did that the result would be a system that nobody without special education could understand.

Sure, paper ballots are slow and the process lengthy and labour intensive. But the results are surprisingly stable and trustworthy even in many places where one would expect corruption and manipulation.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#199

Post by atoav »

eru wrote: post #167
rcxdude wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> (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.

Huh? That is not how this works.

For a high stakes election I would take the most trustworthy system. So give me an argument why I should invest money into building a less trustworthy one?

Because it I get results faster? I don't care about speed, high stakes elections are rare enough for that not to matter.

Because it is more efficient? I don't care about efficiency, I want the result to be accurate and the process to be understandable by the stupid bloke in the pub with whom I have to discuss the result.

There is literally no reason why this should be replaced by a digital system other than it makes us needs feel special.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#200

Post by synecdoche »

mmaul wrote: post #172
jimhefferon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of the news is that in the US (and that I can see, in many places) a lot of people have been convinced not to believe experts.

The trend is growing here to, sadly. It's not people disagree with experts experts but that truth told by the, disagrees with a distorted perception or reality.

Or the other way around; the so called experts are actually tools in a propaganda machine, and people choose to rather believe their own experiences than second hand information.
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