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Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

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Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#51

Post by tossandthrow »

thepra wrote: post #43
exabrial wrote: post #31

Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, they check your eligibility, then you’re given an anonymous ticket, in another room you vote using said ticket, and get a receipt. You can see your but counted online using said receipt. There are two problems with this: 1. You can’t verify extra or in eligible v…

Please forget about showing up physically, it's noble to think of "you really care" but in places with organized crime they have ways to count if those that depend on them come and vote for their "right" choice. It has been estimated that around 20-30% of IRL votes in Italy follow the organized crimes choice.

You don't think this is even more pronounced if the criminals can keep af gun to your head in your own home when voting?

That said - I am yet to see any protocol that is resilient against not showing up IRL (due to the exact reason above).

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#52

Post by tossandthrow »

staindk wrote: post #44
exabrial wrote: post #31

Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, they check your eligibility, then you’re given an anonymous ticket, in another room you vote using said ticket, and get a receipt. You can see your but counted online using said receipt. There are two problems with this: 1. You can’t verify extra or in eligible v…

Why is the act of physically showing up so important? I think reducing friction can be a great way to get more people to vote.

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

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#53

Post by wakawaka28 »

crazygringo wrote: post #42
the_snooze wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these are technically interesting systems, but "trust" really is the goal. "Verifiability" doesn't necessarily imply "trust," especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo. A voting system should be something voters and poll workers (i.e., local volunteers) can understand.

> especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details. Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then…

The difference between trusting HTTPS with credit card details and trusting crypto BS for voting is that you can easily tell if your credit card ends up abused. You can't easily tell if your vote is or isn't counted.

You're generally right about each point in the process being a potential point of corruption. That's why voting systems need to be very simple and involve lots of people, even if it costs more. Ideally multiple independent parties would count the votes and compare results for discrepancies, until they reached an agreement.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#54

Post by mariusor »

oakesm9 wrote: post #14

Tom Scott videos which cover why electronic voting is a bad idea: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=kGDOYOb_RiiQaZ3u https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=YdQgNC4uUZDUDbab

Something being hard does not mean that it should not be tried.

There are methods for preventing all the issues Tom Scott raises.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#55

Post by evantbyrne »

declan_roberts wrote: post #27
evantbyrne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is a social challenge, not a technological one. It is effectively impossible to stuff ballot boxes at scale in the US, but a large number of people still believe the last presidential election was stolen.

Who needs scale? Doesn't the election ultimately come down to a couple of counties in 2 or 3 swing states?

Even sneaking a single box of ballots into an American polling station would get caught in a key district. Please see my response to baggy_trough.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#56

Post by crazygringo »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #53
crazygringo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details. Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then…

The difference between trusting HTTPS with credit card details and trusting crypto BS for voting is that you can easily tell if your credit card ends up abused. You can't easily tell if your vote is or isn't counted. You're generally right about each point in the process being a potential point of corruption. That's why voting systems need to be very simple and involve lots of people, even if it costs more. Ideally m…

> You can't easily tell if your vote is or isn't counted.

That's why I said:

> such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted

There absolutely has to be a way to easily tell if your vote is or isn't counted, and that it's part of the sum total. I don't know if Belenios specifically does this in a way that is easy to see, but there's nothing inherently difficult or impossible about it.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#57

Post by wakawaka28 »

mightyham wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The system must be something a bottom 15 percentile person can understand and doesn’t think is magic. https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo?si=RDsgH2uIKb8k7ueG

Or universal suffrage is fundamentally flawed. If people can't understand mildly complex voting systems then why should they be contributing to making political decisions that are significantly more complex.

Do you think any sitting politician, your physician, or your accountant really understands cryptography? Do you think studying cryptography needs to be a prerequisite to voting? I swear, sometimes nerds are insufferable snobs.

As for the implications of your premise: Do you feel comfortable in not having a say whether you are taxed more, have your hobbies criminalized, or get sent off to die in some awful war somewhere so that some jerk can get rich? Because that's what you ask for when you say some obnoxious technocrat is fine running the country with no input.

And before you mention passing an exam or something to vote, that's just a direct path to corruption and disenfranchisement.

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#58

Post by tzs »

exabrial wrote: post #31

Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, they check your eligibility, then you’re given an anonymous ticket, in another room you vote using said ticket, and get a receipt. You can see your but counted online using said receipt. There are two problems with this: 1. You can’t verify extra or in eligible v…

For in-person voting use "fill in the oval" ballots that can be hand counted or counted by offline optical card scanners, and augment that with Scantegrity II [1].

Scantegrity II is a system that adds end-to-end voter verifiability [2] to such systems by combining some clever chemistry with some clever cryptography. It requires no hardware modifications at the voting site except that special markers have to be used to mark the ballots.

Briefly, a code is printed inside each oval using a special ink that is invisible, which turns visible when that oval is marked by a special marker.

After the election all the ballots can be published, allowing any third party to independently verify the counts.

Voters that wish to verify that their ballot was included in the count and counted correctly can note the code from the oval and afterwards use it to verify the count. The code cannot be used to prove to a third party, such as a vote buyer or vote coercer, that the person voted the "right" way. Here's a proof of that [3].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#59

Post by mariusor »

tossandthrow wrote: post #52
staindk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the act of physically showing up so important? I think reducing friction can be a great way to get more people to vote.

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 be statistically significant is even more difficult, and if it's still possible the entity holding the ballot can be assumed to have more pressing issues to care about than fair ballots. :D

Re: Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

#60

Post by rayiner »

mightyham wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The system must be something a bottom 15 percentile person can understand and doesn’t think is magic. https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo?si=RDsgH2uIKb8k7ueG

Or universal suffrage is fundamentally flawed. If people can't understand mildly complex voting systems then why should they be contributing to making political decisions that are significantly more complex.

Maybe, but I don't agree with the cure. I think intellectualizing voting is a fool's errand in a representative democracy. I'd much rather filter on having good, democratic instincts. I'd rather have e.g. an Iowan who has a gut-level orientation toward De Tocquevillian democracy than a naturalized foreign elite who has been socialized to think of governance in terms of hierarchy.
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