It will all run on servers, where I am the administrator.
USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
71–80 of 390 posts
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#72Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…
You are not the only one. However I don't think security is even a relevant concern, because there is one much more fundamental flaw in all electronic voting systems:
The goal of voting is to produce agreeable consent — so it doesn't really matter how you organise voting, as long as everybody afterwards can agree who won, who lost and by how much.
So phrased differently, one of the most important properties of any voting systems is that people afterwards can't just call the result into question. This can only be true if most people voting understand the mechanism, can verify it themselves and manipulation on big scales is hard.
This is why I think any electronic voting system is problematic. Even a total expert would have a hard time proving that one machine worked as it should on election day. If you then have some Autocrat who raises doubt about the election result whom do you trust? That expert who tells you that manipulation was mathematically impossible or that autocrat whose party you vote?
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 elect…
??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.
You don't know my bitcoin wallet address unless I share it with you, and you wouldn't know my voting ID unless I shared it with you.
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#74Earlier 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".
I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court)
- Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case. - Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts. - Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short. - Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location) - The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules. - The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting. - the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks) - as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room - the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard - results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics - all the results, down the voting district level are available online - I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website - it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not - there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public
This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people.
TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#75Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…
> Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?
You're not the only one, most people on HN have the same opinion, and all these ideas have been extensively discussed here.
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#76Maybe 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…
And couldn't you just have one flat log file as an append-only ledger of all the votes? Maybe add a time stamp and location stamp to each prime recorded for context.
Found this gem. https://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/millions/
1 million primes is about 2mb zipped. Even with additional information, a national election result of 130 million votes could fit on a CD.
The beauty of this is we have a completely transparent record that requires no unique software to view or test. No black boxes, and no magic beyond the magic of primes.
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#77Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure…
You're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/2030/
> Our entire field is bad at what we do.
Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers.
Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon).
However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#78What 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…
Hmm, not sure that would work though.
What happens when an ID is stolen? If there is nothing mapping "John Smith" to "ID #12345", then you have no way to revoke IDs because you cannot know if the person claiming the ID is the true owner.
Wouldn't that mean stealing IDs will be virtually un punishable, and reselling them very lucrative?
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#79Earlier 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.
Just because the blockchain is public doesn't mean that the identity of voters is public. You know which one your vote is; that information isn't otherwise public.
When you vote right now, your vote is (theoretically) tied to your identity, because every ballot has an id tied to it, so it's not like you'd be giving up any more anonymity than you had. I don't know of any practical fully anonymous election systems that are post-hoc verifiable, but maybe somebody does.
Re: USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/2030/
> Our entire field is bad at what we do. Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers. Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon). Ho…
> building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_
This is patently untrue when it comes to security. OpenBSD is the closest thing I'm aware of to a "secure" widely used system, and I'm sure that OpenBSD machines are compromised every day.
The day that a network exploit is treated with the same seriousness as a commercial jetliner crash is the day I'll believe software security has grown up.