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Comment by chmaynard | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if blockchain technology could play a role in the development of a secure and reliable online voting system.

I don't think the blockchain is going to protect you from a maniac with a wrench "convincing" you to vote the way he likes.

And how would a paper system prevent that?

At least where I am from you must go and cast a vote privately alone on paper. So this can't be executed on big scale, you could only force couple people to cast a specific vote without getting kicked out or arrested.

What's to stop a maniac with a wrench "convincing" you to transfer all of your money to his bank account electronically?

Money transfers can be rolled back rather easily and unless that maniac has an offshore account, wants to be on the run for quite some time and get close enough to someone with enough money to actually make it worthwhile, it's hardly going to work out or be worth the trouble.

Being coerced into voting for a certain party is a whole different problem, with different actors. You're not going to run the election again when the spouse of someone pressured them into voting against their will. How would you even want to prove it had happened in the first place? There's not going to be a paper trail without giving up voter secrecy, which is yet another problem.

Blockchain allows you to prove order in which some events happened and thus indirectly prove when such events happened (and in fact it is not some new technology, it is how really trusted timestamping authorities always worked).

For voting you don't need to order or timestamp anything, so blockchains are mostly irrelevant.

Are you people still looking to find a single valid use case for the blockchain?

I mean, it seems pretty obvious. Any data you want to exist in decentralized semi-perpetuity.

Historical accounts seem like a good place to start.

YES!

Well, you could take some kind of unique voter ID number and run it through a one-way hash. Then you could check your vote, verify that it was accurately recorded, and view how each vote was tallied. The current system is terrible and better solutions exist.

The current manual system works. Why is it terrible? Most results are available within 24-48 hours an electronic system may speed that up but for no appreciative benefit.

What's to stop you from selling your hashed voter ID to a vote buyer, before the tally is published?

He verifies that your hash corresponds to the vote he purchased, and pays you the money (or doesn't beat you up, fire you, etc. I'm using "sell" in the generic coercion sense)

What's to stop you from selling you paper vote to someone?

For a paper ballot, it's much more difficult and risky to prove delivery, yet you are fairly certain it's been counted.

The grandparent proposes a perfect counting guarantee, at the cost of providing every voter and coercer a crypto proof of the ballot value, a very bad compromise.

Wouldn't a cell phone video of the vote seller casting their ballot suffice as proof to the buyer?

Plenty of places make it illegal to take a photo in the voting booth (or polling station generally), and the voting booth is visible enough to election officials (albeit with your back to them and hence the ballot not directly visible) that it'd be very hard to do without arousing suspicion.

It's easy to configure the voting booth to provide privacy for the voting itself, while making it risky to photograph the vote. You don't know the vote was actually delivered, ex. he might have gotten a fresh voting paper or punched/stamped excessive options to annul the vote. There is also an electronic evidence trail of the fraud - any caught vote seller will immediately cooperate with the authorities and rat on the ringmasters.

Real world security works on "just hard enough not to be worthwhile", not absolute guarantees.

electronic devices and photographic equipment aren't even allowed in my local polling places. i had to leave a kindle outside. that is as it should be.

What exactly is wrong with selling your vote?

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