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An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

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Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#31
post #8

As a software engineer who knows very little about government security and voting security, can someone explain why you can't just build it like a regular web app (with very good security measures -- the usual HTTPS, database encryption, proper firewall rules to servers, etc.), and have the user enter their voter ID and social security and submit their vote via a web form? From reading this article, it would seem tha…

There is an excellent talk about Internet Voting and why this is extremely difficult [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_pHvhE4os

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#32
I made this comment on a related thread yesterday[0]:

You don't need crypto. You just need a machine that prints out a human readable receipt that the voter can see but not alter, which then drops into a secure holding area on the machine. At the end of the day, you randomly select say 1% of all the machines and hand count all the ballots inside, making sure the counts and votes match. If they do, then you can be reasonably sure it wasn't tampered with, and if they don't match, then you can hand count all the paper ballots using the old system to verify the computer.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12924053

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#33
post #32

I made this comment on a related thread yesterday[0]: You don't need crypto. You just need a machine that prints out a human readable receipt that the voter can see but not alter, which then drops into a secure holding area on the machine. At the end of the day, you randomly select say 1% of all the machines and hand count all the ballots inside, making sure the counts and votes match. If they do, then you can be rea…

How does this accomplish goals #1 and #2 of TFA?

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to make a simple, verifiable, understandable voting system: paper ballot, maybe with an electronic counter. You can explain in about 30 seconds that the ballots shouldn't be individually identifiable, you have a record that is difficult to tamper with, etc. How many people have a rigorous understanding of Zero Knowledge proofs? How many people would be able to audit the implementation of such a system? Th…

I live in Colorado, where we recently (a few cycles ago) introduced nearly 100% mail-in voting. In my opinion, we should move the whole country to this system; participation will likely go up, lines for folks who show up on election day are manageable and there is significantly less human error when you don't have to rush it all in one day. I agree that a blockchain solution may be overly complex, but I think the spi…

The problem with mail-in voting is voter influence. When you vote at a polling place, you're guaranteed to be able to vote in a booth on your own, without other people or party advertising to influence you. With mail-in voting there's no way to stop voters' controlling spouse and/or cult leader from influencing their vote or even voting for them.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#35
The most common form of vote fraud is probably ballot stuffing by an insider. With this type of attack every voter who actually voted can verify that there vote was counted properly but the aggregate is still not legitimate. One of the advantages of a paper system is that 10000 ballots is physically large and would be difficult to sneak in to a polling place/ballot box.

With something like this you just need a USB stick, the voter registration database, and the records from the last few elections (and/or death records) to figure out which votes are safe to stuff. If you do make a mistake you will end up with some people who's votes are rejected and no way for an election official to differentiate between that and someone trying to vote twice.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#36

The main problem with digitally signing/encrypting a vote is that the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous. I like the idea of a county/precinct/district being the entity who signs the results of a vote. This would protect the anonymity of individual voters, since results are reported on a per county basis today anyways. And if a county is suspected of voter fraud, you could a…

> the public key must be known, which means that someone's vote cannot be anonymous.

How does this follow?

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#37
post #8

As a software engineer who knows very little about government security and voting security, can someone explain why you can't just build it like a regular web app (with very good security measures -- the usual HTTPS, database encryption, proper firewall rules to servers, etc.), and have the user enter their voter ID and social security and submit their vote via a web form? From reading this article, it would seem tha…

The current level you're playing at is: protect against script kiddies, XSS, and drive by server attacks.

The level that system would play at is: protect against other nations with sophistication at the level of the NSA, protect against other nations that compromise an employee of said system, and to protect against large scale DDOS attacks during a critical time in our democracy

The presidential election would arguably be the biggest target of hackers. With the right hack you're essentially directing hundreds of billions of dollars where you want to if you elect the right candidate.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#38
I think a major problem with this proposal is that all votes could eventually be knowable. Let's be honest, the state of the art encryption we use today will one day be sub-par. New has become antiquated a dozen times over the last 30 years already.

Put enough compute behind that blockchain and eventually you'll crack it, or run Shor's algorithm on the first Quantum Computer and votes from a decade ago are now public.

My contacts in the intelligence community say this is their biggest fear with intercepted communications today. They may be 'secure enough' today, but some of the information moved around would still be devastating if it were decrypted 20 years from now by a bad actor, not all, but some.

The way you should go about this is little different IMHO. Have two blockchains, one that checks if people have voted, and one that records the vote. If you have not voted, then one anonymous vote may be added to the ledger of votes for final tallying. If you have voted, your request is blocked. Maybe you get a random key that gives you the right to add a vote if you pass the first checkpoint, but that key can not be associated with the record that you voted on the other blockchain.

Cool idea. I for one prefer physical voting. It sucks, but I feel safer with it.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#39
I can't believe this talk hasn't been posted yet!

Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Elections with Cryptography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s

This is probably one of the homomorphic schemes mentioned in TFA.

It's very old (2007-ish?) and the state of the art probably advanced, but it's very interesting and addresses a number of points that are not cared for in TFA (like secret ballots verifiable by the voter but impossible to prove to anyone else).

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

#40
There's a bunch of academic research in this area -- how to build an encrypted ballot box that lets you audit that your vote was counted correctly, but prevents anyone else from seeing what your vote was.

However, a fundamental problem with any kind of online voting is that it doesn't prevent your vote from being coerced: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/12/12/erosion-secret-ball... The best known way to do that is to make you walk into a secure area, secretly make your vote on a piece of paper, and put it in a common ballot box. That's the system most countries already have!

E-voting also fails to solve voter suppression problems -- how do you decide who gets a voting ID?

Finally, this kind of thing just isn't needed right now. Is anybody claiming that fraudulent voting was a significant problem in this election, or in any recent US election? Where's the evidence? The current highly decentralized system is already pretty robust against widespread fraud (though slightly less so as electronic voting machines become more popular).

There are far more important problems to solve, like voter suppression and the extreme polarization of politics.

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