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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

The article discusses foreign actors interfering with the election and proposes blockchain as the solution? That's just crazy - with blockchain a state actor just needs 51% of the mining power and they could pwn the election.

There's nothing stopping a state actor for getting 51% of the mining power, and it's plausible that's already the case. If you were a government, wouldn't it be worth spending a few million to build up mining capability just in case you need to exert control? (And if you use that mining capability today through pools, it could almost pay for itself.) If you ever need control, just flip a switch to exit the pool and mine independently to take control of the network. In other words, 80% of the current mining could be done by the NSA and nobody would know until it's too late. (I haven't seen anyone else propose this attack, so am I missing a flaw in it?)

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If you voted, and such a 51% attack happened, you would notice your vote was reverted. Not to mention getting that 51% mining power plus catching up to the blockchain to be able to reverse it is increasingly expensive the more time/blocks it passes since the transaction.

So yes it's not "perfect", but it sure looks harder to manipulate than a centralized database server that only requires a simple UPDATE sql query to completly and stealthily change an election.

> you would notice your vote was reverted.

How? That means there is a record of my vote tied to my identity. That's not an anonymous ballot. Now you've opened up all sorts of other problems of coercion, etc. You'd have to get your key from the government, so there is a chance to get it. You could track every time someone voted and in which elections which would let you narrow down where they live pretty easily.

Well in this case such a voting would be done using some variation of a ZK-Snark (or some other cryptographic algo) which would allow you to check your vote counted, yet remain anonymous.

It has to be tied to my key. That means if people can get my key they can figure out my vote. That's an insta-no for me. Someone has to hand out the keys (since only registered voters can vote) so they can keep a record or be compromised.

In our current system you can find out that I voted, but not how I voted. That should be how it's setup.

In regards to normal/traditional voting (which I prefer to current internet solutions btw, for the reasons below), it can have its own issues as a lot of countries can attest to.

That said, We're talking about digital voting here (or at least I was) and the comparison is to a digital centralized solution, in which browser history, cookies, server logs, and not to mention the database itself has issues that can compromise the voter and the election.

The key system, wouldn't necessary have to work that way (you could have a derivative id or something like that, the system could automatically assign tokens each election without the need for manual distribution, you can throw away the temporary key, etc..). It's a open problem though, and it's good to bring these critiques up and think about solutions, I woudln't dismiss the whole thing though on the first problem found, it's easy to criticise but most technologies do have issues initially that need to be solved (and that's part of the fun). What's so interesting about decentralization technologies is that they open new possibilities and novel solutions to old problems.

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