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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

   and it’s actually damn easy to achieve

And it's very very expensive

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UK election: £142m for 42m voters, or about £3 each.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39882972

The Irish e-voting debacle cost €55m for an electorate of roughly 3 million people: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-sc...

I'm not advocating for e-voting because they don't seem to offer (yet) the same good qualities as regular voting.

But you need to take into account people transportation and opportunity cost (if I lose 1 hour going to vote, this time could have been directed at working, thus it cost me ten or twenty the price you just spoke about).

I'm inclined to believe many of these reports are biased and still pushing agendas, even if it is out of peoples on lack of understanding of how a blockchain solution would actually work. Largely, their inability to think creatively about technical solutions.

Current e-voting systems don't seem to offer privacy, and security.. (are they even open source ?)

But yes a distributed e-voting system based on blockchain or whatever could work and maybe much cheaper as it would only take a few minutes online to vote. The result could be that more referendums would be held more often.

Home PCs are too easily compromised for this to be really trustworthy, even if you issue all the voters with hardware tokens. It might be achievable with iPhones, but that's rather exclusive.

In other words, it's not the backend that's the worry so much as the frontend. (Leaving aside all the blockchain-specific issues)

There is no electronic voting system, real or imagined, which can guarantee both the secret ballot and the public vote count. Because there is no algorithmic equivalent to the secure one-way hash for dropping physical ballots into a ballot box.

Block chains record votes cast in order. Which correlate with the order those same ballots were issued (or received, as with postal ballots). Voila, no more secret ballot.

The proposal to fudge the time stamps (chunking, roundoff or jitter) does not work for real world USA elections. Because the smallest administrative unit is the precinct (from 0 to 1000 voters) and ballot casting is bursty (vs spread evenly over time).

How expensive? In my country, where we still use paper ballots dropped into sealed boxes, the whole budget for the election operations is less than 1€/citizen.

Wow really ? Sounds reasonable.

(Should also take into account people transportation to the location, and the opportunity cost of their time)

My only personal experience is in cities, but my home was never more than 20m on foot from my voting place. I also know that even villages with less than 300 residents have one.

We also have many thousands of voting booths, so waiting times are low. One hour is rare.

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