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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Furthermore, "secure elections" are a solved problem. Have paper ballots, and scan them later. If you have any reason to suspect the scanners, then throw away the scanners and then proceed by hand.

There are statistical methods to count a small number by hand (+ corroborate with poll results) to ensure a degree of consistency. Chi-squared distributions and stuff (I'm not a mathematician, but I'm sure there's some statistical method to verify the results without counting everything by hand).

The main problem with blockchain is that it requires everyone to trust the blockchain. With humans counting by hand, you don't require any trust. As long as the ballots are properly stored, you can always recount the results.

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You still require trust with the paper ballots, there are multiple threat models:

- System needs to ensure everyone votes only once

- Ensure each person meets the qualifications to vote

- Ensure ballots cannot be counterfeit or additional ballots inserted somehow

- Ensure votes are confidential throughout the process

- Ensure voters cannot prove their votes to others

- Ensure the people counting are trusted or the results checked / verified

- Ensure all ballots are actually counted

One significant negative with the paper ballot method is that voters cannot confirm the last point. I have no way of confirming that my ballot was actually counted and contributed to the final tally's.

To attack paper ballots you need people. Like thousands of people working with you to manipulate important elections directly at the source.

With electronic voting, you potentially need a single person with a computer on the other side of the globe exploiting a security flaw, that will inevitably be there. Whoever claims to write bug free software is a conman.

I also don't want to be able to verify my vote. If I can, that means that somebody else also can. Given how tech-illiterate the average human is, voting crypto keys will be littered all around the internet.

>I also don't want to be able to verify my vote. If I can, that means that somebody else also can. Given how tech-illiterate the average human is, voting crypto keys will be littered all around the internet.

Right, I should have been more clear. You typically do want voters to be able to prove that they voted and that their vote was counted, but you do not want voters to be able to prove the contents of their vote (who they voted for).

Some kinda famous cryptographers have designed verifiable paper voting systems:

https://rangevoting.org/RivSmiPRshort.html

https://rangevoting.org/RivSmiAnswers.html

https://rangevoting.org/SleatorCheapo.html

ThreeBallot was broken (and the fix unworkable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot#Broken_Encryption

Thanks, didn't know that. What about the other variants?

It doesn't scale to every voter, but in my country anyone can request to witness the opening of the local sealed boxes and the subsequent count.

>- Ensure voters cannot prove their votes to others

>- Ensure all ballots are actually counted

aren't these two contradictory?

I believe aeternus means proving the contents of the vote, not simply that they voted. In that case, no, they're not contradictory.

Pretty much all those points apply with electronic voting too.

With electronic voting I pretty much lose the ability to verify my vote wasn't changed. With paper I can achieve a high level of confidence that a significant number of votes didn't get changed as lots of people with opposing interests are watching each other.

With electronic voting:

- I can't read the code since it's likely closed source (and not many people can read code)

- Even if it's open source I can't verify that the code I verified is running the code I verified. A USB port is a security risk, any printout can be forged and finally I certainly wouldn't be allowed to inspect the machine's insides. And this is ignoring all the other code on the machine in stuff like the touch screen controller etc.

- So given that the code is a blackbox, I can't verify that my vote hasn't been changed silently, especially since the crypto token I'm given doesn't allow me to verify my vote.

Whereas, with paper ballots, the average person is able to understand the risks and be able to mitigate them. Especially, since you'll have people with opposing votes trying to find the other side cheat.

Elections are too important and people are motivated to try and hack them, since the likelihood of getting caught hacking is much smaller than the massive effort you'd need to materially affect a paper ballot.

Calling "secure elections" a solved problem made me laugh.

Thanks for pointing that out. I laughed too. Shill obviously works for a problem.

I remember back in college listening to a guest lecturer talk about the problems with electronic voting. It was very interesting. I think the entire political world is still feeling the wrath of the 21st century. Hopefully we all make it out alive.

This removes the cryptography aspects, which is what keeps the system and results verifiable after the fact. Of course the votes can be counted and statistical estimations of accuracy can be used to attempt to detect fraud but that can also be performed AFTER each individual vote is recorded on a blockchain. In fact the only reason not to utilize blockchain technology in election processes is to ensure the results can be manipulated.

What blockchain voting scheme(s) provide at least as much anonymity as paper ballots?

Can you clarify this a bit? What unique security assurances are offered by a blockchain that cannot be provided by other cryptographic methods?

Paper ballots are fine for infrequent elections. But not for things a bit more ... liquid[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

For tallying results, trust has to be placed in the people and/or machines tallying the results.

With a blockchain-based system, every voter would count everyone else's votes

How would you know every vote was registered in the blockchain?

Because its a public, verifiable data structure. That's not to say it's perfect, it's subject to 51% attacks so yes votes could possibly be discarded in that case.

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