Hacker News Reader

Comment by hmcdona1 | Hacker News Reader

What? I agree it works, but it's pretty insecure. Paper ballots can just be swapped out for other paper ballots. With a public blockchain (or something like it) you could always look up your vote and by nature it cannot be changed. The vote count could be tallied instantly as well and recounts are unnecessary.

Blockchains can't ensure no false votes are cast for deceased or unwilling participants, but it honestly would be better than paper in many ways. I am not advocating people use some third party token to do this. That I believe would be unnecessary. Am I missing something though? I don't understand the overwhelming hatred any blockchain related tech gets on HN. This is one area where I think it could provide real value.

View on HN

> With a public blockchain (or something like it) you could always look up your vote and by nature it cannot be changed.

So all you have to do is to set up a fake website advertising "Look up if your vote is counted as it should be", let people type in their credentials, and you now know exactly how millions of people have voted.

Paper ballots work because it's dead simple. Your ballot goes into a box, multiple eyeballs from multiple parties continuously watch the box, and then the box is opened and everything in it is counted, with no way to connect each ballot to individual voters. That you cannot "look up your vote" later is not a bug: it's a feature.

Look up zero-knowledge proofs. Solves this problem. Blockchain is the only legitimate way to carry out voting, imo.

zero knowledge proofs fail to address this concern:

> all you have to do is to set up a fake website advertising "Look up if your vote is counted as it should be", let people type in their credentials, and you now know exactly how millions of people have voted.

this is a social engineering problem, not a cryptography problem. said social engineering would be much harder to implement with paper ballots than a system that's available over the internet.

further, your reply does not address this concern:

> That you cannot "look up your vote" later is not a bug: it's a feature.

i should not be able to verifiably let another party know how i voted. to use your own rhetorical device, i'd suggest you look up vote selling and voter coercion.

>>>> Paper ballots with automated scanners is a solved problem. It works, it's cheap, and it's virtually tamper-proof. (Tampering with the result will require physical access by many people: if you allow that possibility you're basically conceding that you cannot trust the government to run the election properly, and using any technology won't save you.)

>>>> In other words, paper ballots is a boring, unsexy technology whose only benefit is that it works. No wonder people aren't excited.

> Blockchain is the only legitimate way to carry out voting, imo.

you'll have to forgive me if i'm still unconvinced.

There are multiple people watching ballot boxes during the election. Best part - anyone can signup to watch and later count them. It's dead-simple job and any nut can easily do it. On top of that, all major parties have their own people watching each other. You'd need massive operation to mess up even single voting outpost.

Meanwhile with e-voting we'd loose transparency. Non-tech people would be completely out of the loop. Many tech people would have hard time inspecting hardware and source code too. Let alone there's no bullet proof way to ensure code on the machines and machines themselves weren't tampered.

E-voting is a wet dream of any conspiracy theorist...

> Paper ballots can just be swapped out for other paper ballots.

I would offer you $10,000 to prove that you can do this in an Australian election. To actually, your own self, swap one ballot for another in a way that I can verify, during an election.

But it's a crime for you to do it and a crime for me to ask you to do it.

And, here's my actual point: you would be caught doing it.

Just like everyone doing crimes always get caught. Please. Not only can it be done, it should be done.

> With a public blockchain (or something like it) you could always look up your vote and by nature it cannot be changed. ... Am I missing something though?

Ballot secrecy. Without it you get vote-buying and voter coercion. If you want to see what that looks like, ask your legislators about which lobbyists they met last week.

Good point! If keys/addresses were assigned in secret, I don't see how blockchain forensics could identify someone given that voting is simply transactions going one way. The only way might be time, but that could be a big give away.

There's also people providing their public address as proof of a vote in exchange for something, but the risk for the buyer is that someone just hands over someone else's transaction and votes as they please.

A real potential solution would be to make the votes private and "untraceable" (A la Monero ring signatures or something of the sort), but that kind of comes with it's own pros and cons and could always be broken later. I still think it's worth investigating if this is more secure than plain old paper ballots.

Or you could just stick to proved, simple reforms that have been introduced in Australia over the last century or so.

Cryptography is powerful, but it tends to be on such an absurdly higher level of assurance inside its narrow applications that it becomes very attractive to try to stuff everything into it, whether or not that's warranted or useful.

Democratic legitimacy comes from the volume of participating individuals who trust and understand the system. Paper ballots are easily understood, independent electoral commissions improve trustworthiness, election scrutineers ensure every room has mutually suspicious observers highly motivated to detect problems, compulsory voting helps ensure the median voter dominates policy and preferential voting helps prevent minority candidates from inverting majority preferences against bad candidates.

None of these require a blockchain. It is a distraction from the actual reforms that will make the important differences.

Fair enough, I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot. The way OP worded his response made it seem like paper was the most secure end all be all solution. If there are other reforms in place I might agree.

The thing is that as technologists, we see a software solution in every shadow. Sometimes software is the wrong solution, taking account of all the needs in hand.

The kind of electoral systems most of us want requires both ballot secrecy and a trustworthy count. Pure software ballots don't achieve that. Paper ballots don't categorically achieve it either, but it's much harder to violate either of the secrecy or count requirements because paper is bulky and the watching eyeballs are numerous. In practical terms: paper ballots can be made to work. I'm from a country where they do.

A blockchain system either works on a public chain, meaning I can sell my vote, or it uses a zero-proof scheme. The zero-proof schemes I'm aware of require someone, somewhere, to seed the chain with a private key. Then we're all just supposed to hope they deleted the one set of bits that can untraceably edit everybody's history. They pinky-swear they'll do it. But there's no way to prove they did, which rather sours the blockchain-can-prove-anything story.

Not to mention the problem that they allow retrieval. Sure, you can't prove that I ever owned a particular ballot. But I can retrieve an identical ballot. That might work for evading money laundering charges but it still kinda fits the vote-selling usecase.

It drives me nuts because this our love of reinvention and our fondness for assuming we can solve everything from first principles as if nobody's thought of these problems before. These problems are already solved in a simple, scalable, subversion-resistant way that everyone can understand. All we have to do is accept that, for once, our profession was not required to interrupt everyone else to give our opinion.

i regret that i have but one upvote to give

> I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot.

I am being dead serious and I'm not trying to antagonize you here: the fact that you responded and seemed to have a firm opinion on an area you admit you aren't well versed in... well that to me is a huge problem with the way democracy works. It's a trait that we complain about when non-nerd voters vote in uninformed ways on technology and science issues. Blockchain isn't going to solve that.

Better educated voters will do a lot more to improve democracy than blockchain will.

We can't even get reasonable technology choices for the evoting approaches we've tried (we can't even get vendor transparency), and that's not for lack of good proposals for evoting systems over the years. It's because the people choosing the technology don't understand it super well, and are often in the pockets of the vendors.

In practice, it feels like paper ballots are a much better solution than most of the evoting systems we use in the real world currently, and paper ballots certainly feel better to me than any of the completely nebulous "but what about blockchain?" proposals here and elsewhere.

to anyone still harping on blockchain, can you give a detailed description of a realistic threat model where it performs better than paper ballots.

>>> I still think it's worth investigating if this is more secure than plain old paper ballots.

I would agree with that general sentiment, but the overwhelming evidence right now points to "no", IMO.

i will also say, the thing that you're doing that i'm complaining about is a thing that programmers do a lot, and is a thing that i'm plenty guilty of myself (thinking everything is more solvable than it is because you can envision rough pseudocode or systems diagrams for it in your head). this is a thing i'm really trying to get better about not doing.

I think one of the points OP was trying to make is if you have the capability to swap out enough paper ballots to materially affect an election, you would also have the ability to fake or distort a blockchain implementation...

Not really, in India we have something called booth capturing. It was pretty rampant in time of paper ballots. This people are not going to learn blockchain.

> This people are not going to learn blockchain.

If there's one constant for humans it is this: people will learn whatever they need, however complicated it might be, if it promises to make them rich quick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com