Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

heraldsheets.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 390 posts

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

#21

Post by sebmellen »

galkk wrote: post #17
colordrops wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote ca…

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.

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 paper ballot.

The real problem is compiler and hardware level.

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

#22

Post by marzell »

sebmellen wrote: post #19
Galanwe wrote: post #15

What troubles me with this is that at some point in the system there will need to be a mapping "real identity" -> "ID of voter in the blockchain". What happens the day this mapping leaks?

In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token , without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly wit…

How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?

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

#23

Post by sebmellen »

foepys wrote: post #13
colordrops wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote ca…

How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? That when they vote for X that the counter for X is increasing by 1? By verify I mean full understanding of the process without the need to believe somebody who calls themselves an "expert".

This is a tricky UX issue at the moment, but I'm sure this will be doable in time.

The nice thing about blockchains is that once transactions are finalized, the state is known, independently of whether or not the user was hacked. With zero-knowledge proofs, voters could theoretically verify that their "right to vote token" (as I've explained in another answer above) was used to cast a certain vote, without revealing their identity.

Now, if the software they're using is malicious, or their device is vulnerable, the election is screwed.

It's worth noting that Estonia manages digital elections quite nicely with their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system to ensure system integrity

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

#24

Post by [deleted] »

colordrops wrote: post #10
foepys wrote: post #2

All blockchain (and electronic for that matter) voting systems are inherently bad because they are not easy to verify. Nothing beats pen and paper in verifiability and ease of use. If done right with many eyes on the ballots, manipulation requires thousands of co-conspirators. The only downside is the slow speed.

You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote ca…

[deleted]

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

#25

Post by DarthGhandi »

barbegal wrote: post #20

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each…

How do you prove the database hasn't been tampered with?

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

#26

Post by sebmellen »

marzell wrote: post #22
sebmellen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token , without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly wit…

How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?

In Estonia, a user has a digital ID card, which contains a secure chip. Neither they or their computers can ever read the private keys contained in this chip. The card is minted like a passport or driver's license, so it's basically impossible to get a card for someone you aren't.

The voting system works similarly to this "right to vote" token model in the backend, from what I know of it. The only difference is that the ID card is where the sensitive data is statically encoded (not on a theoretically hackable computer).

They did have some cryptography problems a while back though. The government says it was not too big of a deal because they caught the bug, and would never have held an election with the bug still present.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/estonia-advanced-digi...

https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto/estonia-sues...

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

#27

Post by pgt »

Maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if for each election we issued a ballot containing a unique, random, sequential prime number to every registered voter?

Then, when counting the votes for each candidate we display the running product of all the primes counted for that candidate as a "checksum", or "check product". This retains privacy while allowing individual voters to easily verify that their vote was counted by simply dividing their party's checksum by their prime ballot number and confirming that it is a factor of the check product. By displaying a running product of votes, you can also verify that your vote was not counted before you voted. Additionally, this prevents double counting because the "checksum" for N primes must match exactly N votes and no two candidates can share a factor. By issuing sequences of primes to certain regions, you can get some metrics by state.

Then you institute a rule that if some % of primes dispute that theirs was counted correctly, a recount is automatically triggered.

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

#28

Post by barbegal »

DarthGhandi wrote: post #25
barbegal wrote: post #20

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each…

How do you prove the database hasn't been tampered with?

You can't but how can you prove the blockchain hasn't been tampered with?

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

#29

Post by tpetry »

marzell wrote: post #22
sebmellen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token , without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly wit…

How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?

Many countries have id numbers which are not a secret. In those countries you simply can‘t do anything with the number. Creating a bank account by mail with a ssn? Impossible you have to be at the department and show your passport. You cant be at a department? The postal service in germany can verify your identity if you are there, or there are some online webcam solutions where you have to show your passport in the webcam, rotate it by instructions etc.

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

#30

Post by sebmellen »

barbegal wrote: post #20

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each…

I strongly disagree. This is a comment from someone who (I presume) is unaware of the advances in Proof-of-Stake blockchains, and other consensus protocols like the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Databases do not have a distributed way to manage consensus - one of the main things that sets a blockchain apart from a distributed database.

This consensus mechanism is what's important when something important (like an election) hinges on the blockchain being an accurate representation of state. This requires a Byzantine-fault-tolerant agreement. See https://medium.com/loom-network/understanding-blockchain-fun....

Post reply on HN