Comment by moviuro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moviuro | Hacker News Reader

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> - A central authority(government) can control issuance of new keys and maintain the association between keys and personal information. [...]

This means that you can tie a vote to a key, thus a person?

That's not how voting should work. Any vote cast must be secret. Or what's to prevent any one group from blackmailing you (or any other voter)?

> Voting app

You mean that a thug could coerce me into casting my vote from home?...

> There's also a question of the integrity of the voting app, but that can/should be open-sourced and audited.

+ constantly verify that the machine was not tampered with (evil maid) + make sure the hardware was not compromised (supply chain attacks) + ... on TONS of devices?...

> We obviously have the tech and the capabilities to create very effective e-voting solutions.

No, clearly we don't! The current paper ballot model has been battle-tested since elections became a thing. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

> That's not how voting should work. Any vote cast must be secret. Or what's to prevent any one group from blackmailing you (or any other voter)?

Fair point, but they do not have to maintain the association with the voting keys. Derivative keys can be signed without it imho.

> You mean that a thug could coerce me into casting my vote from home?...

Dont be naive, things like this happen already even with paper votes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_train

> + constantly verify that the machine was not tampered with (evil maid) + make sure the hardware was not compromised (supply chain attacks) + ... on TONS of devices?...

I agree that's a problem that needs consideration, but we've solved many such issues before. There are quite a few ID, banking, authentication, etc. apps running quite fine and well on consumer devices.

E-voting is a general term that describes methods of voting that involve electronics. While some solutions are indeed terrible, that doesn't mean all are.

> Dont be naive, things like this happen already even with paper votes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_train

That's weird. I don't understand that "filling" paper ballots. In France, we get to pick N papers with only one candidate's name printed on each. We then discard and seal in the envelope the papers we want once we're in the "isolation room".

> I agree that's a problem that needs consideration, but we've solved many such issues before.

No, we never had the entire destiny of any one country rely on a single piece of tech running on untrusted devices. Banks can contact any individual if their logins were leaked or if their money transfer appear suspicious; but as votes cast must be kept secret, you can't do anything similar with voting.

> E-voting is a general term that describes methods of voting that involve electronics. While some solutions are indeed terrible, that doesn't mean all are.

Still waiting for a viable solution - so far I don't know of one.

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