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Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

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Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#41

Post by beautiful_apple »

ritzaco wrote: post #12

I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read qui…

You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable.

You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:

1) all valid votes were counted

2) no invalid votes were added

3) the totals for each candidate is correct

And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

https://www.belenios.org/

Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...

Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world)

https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#42

Post by another-dave »

phoronixrly wrote: post #27
palata wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also e-voting can be hacked (I guess they vote from their computer/smartphone, which can be hacked from the other side of the world). The last place you want to care about phishing, IMO, is voting. Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.

Regular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale. Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in the counting protocols... And of course controlled vote or paid vote... E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.

but it's done in public where anyone observing the count can see that the people counting don't have any pencils etc in their hand

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#43

Post by Auracle »

stetrain wrote: post #28
ericmay wrote: post #15

Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for…

> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…

Pretty much every bill that has ever been put forward for needing an ID to vote has had a provision for free IDs. That’s not where things get caught up.

Also, it’s a pretty silly thing anyways. I don’t even drink and I still need my driver’s license quite a few times every year.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#44

Post by beautiful_apple »

phoronixrly wrote: post #16
ritzaco wrote: post #12

I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read qui…

> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database. It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...

Ironically most production e-voting systems do not use blockchains. That's because there isn't need for decentralization, just verifiability of a correct result and protecting voting secrecy.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#46

Post by Auracle »

phailhaus wrote: post #19
ericmay wrote: post #15

Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for…

Voter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of voting as well?

In my state it doesn’t require that. You just need someone else that’s registered the vouch for you. A registered person can vouch for up to 8 people:

https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/register-to-vote/reg...

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#47

Post by beautiful_apple »

palata wrote: post #2

The title is misleading. It's an e-voting PILOT. That's important. "Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in four of its 26 cantons", three of which were not affected. From Wikipedia [1]: > A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance…

Switzerland has been very careful/ conservative about rolling out e-voting. The same cannot be said of other jurisdictions (like Ontario's municipal elections) where adoption is very rapid and without coordination/support/standards from the provincial or federal governments.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#48

Post by beautiful_apple »

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Meanwhile Brazil does full e-vote for almost 30 years collecting more than 100 million votes (that's 11 times the whole of Switzerland's population). You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and faster.

Brazil's e-voting does not allow voters to vote online from home on a personal computer (like in Switzerland). It has very different requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#49

Post by dolni »

stetrain wrote: post #28
ericmay wrote: post #15

Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for…

> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…

> but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive

Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier?

What constitutes an ID being expensive?

Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#50

Post by fermisea »

ritzaco wrote: post #12

I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read qui…

What about this? Consider a toy system: everyone gets issued a UUID, everyone can see how every UUID voted, but only you know which one is your vote.

This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.

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