What Happened with West Virginia’s Blockchain Voting Experiment?
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1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand)
2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy
3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials.
Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this.
Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?
We were immensly helped by the world wars wiping out so much capital abroad. Even before that, the civil war while costing much life only jump-started our industrial capacity as the fighting was never that far north.
The resource curse is basically a mercantilist problem where the resources extracted are almost entirely exported, and little domestic industry outside of resource extraction.
In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant.
Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier.
In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative.
Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way.
The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.
The fact that there is government provided bottled water in some places should not be looked upon as good management or a success story. It's a bandaid on a broken system and a statewide failure to manage and provide safe water resources and infrastructure.
The the appropriations bill you mention does not make up for the years of failure to provide clean, contaminant free tap water on an equal basis to all communities statewide. And even if it succeeds across the state in every community, it will take years to actually fix all of the tap water problems.
Five days ago, The NY Times reported As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — one out of every three — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-...
The Guardian reports that some Central Valley communities have water contaminated by arsenic, It’s cruel to be living in a state that’s so powerful, so rich, but we can’t count on clean water...:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/californ...
Maywood, a poor city in Los Angeles County, has had a multi-year contaminated tap water problem:
https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-cont...
Consider that the "... Central Valley has been sinking ... since the 1920s and is estimated to have sunk up to 28 feet. During drought years, the valley is prone to accelerated subsidence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
As far back as 1988 there was scientific consensus that the earth was on a trajectory toward a doubling of CO2 levels and by 2001 the IPCC said "it was much more likely than not that our civilization faced severe global warming": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-glob...
California's government has officially acknowledged global warming since at least 2006: https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/ab32/ab32.htm
Also in 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that global warming would impact future water supply by reducing the Sierra Nevada snowpack: https://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/im...
About 30 million Californians rely at least partially upon groundwater sources for their water, but the state didn't get around to regulating well drilling until 2014 with a relatively weak law that "does not go as far as other Western states by granting state agencies the power to authorize or prohibit groundwater withdrawals": https://www.kqed.org/science/21706/what-to-know-about-califo...
I predict that we'll keep seeing well failures in California and that government's actions will not be enough to reliably provide safe tap water to all of California's communities.
The drinking water plan has alarmed some environmental groups, who worry it sets a precedent of the state using the cap and trade money for other purposes as the state struggles to meets its emission reduction goals.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/article233066507.html
So, it sure looks like, in order to address certain water supply problems, which are admittedly exacerbated by global warming, California will diminish its own efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions!
[1] https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia...
After stopping to play tourist, I continued driving and stumbled upon a stranded 3 person group, a hetero couple and the wife's sister, the and that probably weighed 1500 pounds between the 3 of them (no judgements). Their minivan was out of commission, and there was no cellphone reception cuz quiet zone. I offered to help, but I could physically only fit one of them in my Ford Focus hatchback, which could normally fit up to 5 people (uncomfortably). Husband asked if I could get him to Durbin, about 30 minutes down the road, and I said yes. All 500 pounds of him squeezed into the front seat, which itself was an adventure because I am 6'5" and was a heftier 300 pounds myself, and he was spilling a bit into the driver's seat. I was basically squished between the car door and a human wall.
I loved every minute of it. Husband was an awesome dude. We chatted about his career bas a coal miner (complete with a mild case of black lung disease and pending heart failure), life in a sleepy area, and all sorts of stuff. When we got to Durbin, he just asked me to let him own, where he planned to find a phone to call his preacher, who also happened to be the "local" tow truck driver. He walked/waddled off towards some buildings off the main road, and I continued my journey.
Typical flyover state simpletons. If they were were thinking long term like the enlightened people in the urban coastal states they would direct the proceeds of their corruption at their party. After doing this for a couple decades they can have a de-facto one party state and doll out government jobs and contracts to a much wider cross section than just their friends and family further cementing their party's (i.e. their professional network) grip on power.
(this is sarcasm, in case that isn't immediately obvious)
Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.
Perhaps in the near future we will be treated to a layman's explanation of the prevalent (and corrupt) usage of federated blockchains, 'exposed' in a Netflix doc. :)
But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.
Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.
I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Anyone interesting some history of coal country, a great book is "Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area" By Harry M. Caudill. Published 1962.
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Dep...
https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcom...
While the focus of the book is eastern Kentucky, a lot of the content applies to WV and coal country in general.
"At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American Conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region."
Blockchain has already surpassed its boundaries for multiple reasons. However, voting should be beyond that line. There are many questions that need to be answered before even thinking about using blockchain for voting.
- How will identification work?
- What is the proof-of-work scheme?
- How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.
- Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster. Blockchain is all public, how are you going to anonymize everything? IP addresses of transaction owners are already open.
Edit: Formatting.
With a database, you require a persistent connection to the database to have integrity. With a blockchain solution, you can build meshes of local connectivity that sync up.
I'm not a specialist in the area, and I don't think that blockchain is an end-all, be-all. But it does potentially add value.
Nothing about what you described requires a block chain, dump the database to raw SQL and GPG sign it, distribute on your website. It's not like the information ever changes once the vote is done.
Nobody suggesting this as a solution is an expert either.
I'm not saying that blockchain is the answer, just that blockchain is one potential answer, and may have attributes that makes it subjectively better for this use case.
In my state, counties and some cities administer elections, and may semi-independently make product and process selections. There are definitely blockchain-based solutions intended to allow affiliated, independent entities to productively interact. That capability may be of interest to policy folks.
Blockchain - PoW/PoW = signed Merkle Trees
A simple example of the latter is a Git repo. You can just require the commits to be signed. Easy to work with, no need for new code.
One benefit of blockchain is allowing extreme accountability, which seems to be a greater and greater requirement of democracy with large populations.
"But how secure and accurate was the 2018 vote? It’s impossible to tell because the state and the company aren’t sharing the basic information experts say is necessary to properly evaluate whether the blockchain voting pilot was actually a resounding success"
How would you conduct a similar audit of how secure a paper ballot is for any given system? If all you do is an audit of a single vote, then you're no different.
Until paper ballots can no longer be dumped in the trash, paper auditing is hard at best.
Every transaction is available to 7 billion people.
Vs paper voting which is only as legitimate as every voting station.
Precisely. It does nothing to address who can write to it. Ideally, it should be people who are eligible to vote (citizens of the country that are over 18 years old). That's a difficult problem to solve even with paper ballots (especially in a country that doesn't have national IDs), and pretty much impossible to solve with any sort of a digital solution.
> ...that everyone can see.
...or nobody can, as you'd see by reading the article that was submitted.
> Every transaction is available to 7 billion people.
7 billion people can see how to vote as well. You're not asking 7 billion people to vote, but a small subset of 7 billion people.
^ Love how simply put this is
That's the whole problem, and always unsolved (because it's hard). You need to be able to ensure that votes are made by real people, that votes aren't duplicated, and that votes are included in a count. Some of this is easy, some of this is near impossible. None of this is solved by a blockchain, which is at its core simply a remarkably inefficient, if decentralized, timestamping system. When a "blockchain" is presented as a solution, ask why the trustworthiness of timestamping was holding back a particular technology before now.
Blockchain is heavily constrained by the vital requirement of not trusting any third party whatsoever. If you relax this, you can build much simpler systems that are equally secure regarding non-repudiation and other properties but doesn't need proof of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
You might want to look at some of the issues solved by Helios. Its showing its age at this point but the fundamental design goals are the same as if it were designed today.
How do you identify that voters have a vote, and people that shouldn't have a vote didn't vote.
The voters can see that their own transaction went through. Administrators (and everyone else) can count total votes cast at the end of the elections by the balances of the candidates' wallets. That's at least as good as paper ballots in this specific respect.
> and people that shouldn't have a vote didn't vote.
The voter's wallet can be tied to the voter's registration. Again, at least as good as what we have now, in this specific respect.
I think I've just made a more elaborated restatement of what I already said. Could you identify a specific hole in my system? You could point to voting software _in general_ being a bad idea, and that's fair enough. But it doesn't sound like that's what you were saying.
How do you prevent vote selling and coercion?
I don't know why arguing that blockchain doesn't magically solve all your problems means that it can't be used to solve any of them.
But, instead of throwing our votes into a magic black box, how about we put them on a blockchain and receive a way to audit our own votes?
I would scrap the whole "mobile ID" thing, however. You should fill out a voter registration card to get a unique private key that is imported into your wallet.
I'm always confused how I can apply for a mortgage / loan (aka a legally binding financial contract) online with just some details like my name + social security number, but this method of identification seems to not be acceptable when discussing voting?
Your smartphone knows what photos you send to who.
People put their voting preferences on their lawn + bumper sticker in America. I never knew voting was secretive?
Consumers lost more than 16B to fraud in 2016:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/consumers-lost-more-than-16b...
The Equifax breach lost data of 145 million Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#May%E2%80%93July_2017_...
Passwords are still the norm for online authentication, despite providing terrible user-hostile security. The US social security number is used both as an identifier, and as a static never-changing password.
The federal government should issue a nationally recognized identity card to every person which contains a digital certificate around which anyone (especially government services) can build their authentication & authorization systems.
I'm expecting a ton of down-votes into oblivion for the following...
Because you can "chip it" doesn't mean you should.
And, just because you can apply technology to something, also doesn't mean you should.
Time and time again we are shown how vulnerable computers and digital data are.
Voting should be done on paper in local areas overseen by people from each party. They all watch the ballot box. They all see who comes in. Together, they count the votes in front of everyone else and tally them on a piece of paper. Then, they call to their higher-ups these numbers, and so on and so forth.
This is the safest way for anyone to vote.
Elections are one-off events where after-the-fact mitigations reduce its validity. Plus, elections require strong privacy (i.e., voters shouldn't be able to reliably show how they voted).
Elections have far tougher constraints than finance.
In my mind this is the hardest problem to solve.
> - What is the proof-of-work scheme?
It doesn't necessarily need to be proof-of-work and I'd think it makes sense to piggyback off a different trusted network of some kind.
> - How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.
Do transactions actually get lost all that often? In my experience, transactions propagate the network pretty reliably and quickly. You can then look at the number of confirmed blocks to reliably check if its in the ledger.
> - Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster. Blockchain is all public, how are you going to anonymize everything? IP addresses of transaction owners are already open.
IP addresses aren't stored, and the actual transaction could be layered on something like Tor to prevent tracing. You could also have physical voting centers. The important thing is that individual voters can verify their own vote.
One big concern I'd have that you didn't really touch on is around management of keys. In addition to identity verification, how do you handle theft of keys? If a key is stolen, how do you handle disputes to whats in the ledger? I would trust tech savvy people to keep their keys safe, but what about people who don't understand technology?
I don't have a good solution for this one, but maybe it's not as big of a problem as it appears at first glance.
If we assume that a key can be made invalid, in a public way so we all know which keys are marked as invalid (= stolen), then each voter can know if their vote is correctly handled or not. If it's not they can have a chance to dispute or change their vote, possibly going through some extra identification procedure.
With this scheme disputes gets handled by invalidating previous votes, but in a transparent manner to both. Yes this relies on individual voters to keep the system honest, so their votes aren't used improperly, but isn't this an improvement over the system today? Isn't it a more democratic trust based process rather than having to trust election workers not to cheat?
> Researchers have spent decades to figure out a perfect solution but came short.
That doesn't mean improvements can't be made. Researchers have spent decades to figure out peer-to-peer money as well, before Bitcoin was invented. But there are many other examples.
> How will identification work?
Presumably in a similar way voting already works. Tokens are given out after IDs have been checked.
> What is the proof-of-work scheme?
You can easily piggy-back on any existing cryptocurrency if you want.
> How can you be sure that every vote ends up in the ledger? Transactions usually get lost and sometimes takes few tries to reach to miner.
You can easily verify that your vote ended up in the ledger. You can verify in seconds that a transaction has propagated in the network as well. Transactions very seldom get lost, unless you're specifically thinking of Bitcoin which suffer from transaction backlogs from time to time.
> Most important property is that not a single vote should be traced back to its caster.
This is the hard technical problem. There are anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero or ZCash (although there shielded transactions are opt-in) which obscures where transactions come from. Therefore it should be possible to create a system where a single vote cannot be traced back to its caster while you can still count the total number of votes and that a vote is only cast once (this is exactly the properties Monero and ZCash have).
The problem is not with knowing how make a secure voting system. We already know how to do that and it's been in production in various states and counties for decades. I was lucky enough to grow up in one. It's not difficult.
The problem is that election administrators in many places aren't tech savvy enough to know the difference between a Diebold machine with no paper trail and weird hooks (like the ability to invert the results), and actually secure, reliable, easy-to-use systems.
Those folks are susceptible to skilled salesmen from big companies peddling insecure voting systems. As are politicians who have a say in which election machines are purchased, and who are looking for kickbacks, donations and revolving door jobs. That's the problem that needs solving.
DARPA and Galois are working on a standard that I hope the Federal Govt will eventually require for all Federal elections. Create the best possible, open, verifiable voting machine standard, allow any company to implement the standard, and then teach election administrators how to verify the implementation correctly adheres to the standard regardless who the manufacture was.
2. There should not be any proof of work. Really, PoW is one of the worst things to secure a blockchain. In fact, you don’t need a blockchain. You just need a Merkle Tree. Blockchains are about ordering of transactions - the order here is irrelevant! (see caveat below)
3. How can you be sure every vote is counted in ANY system? As long as you can communicate your vote to a network, the gossip protocol takes care of it. Everyone gossips every vote to their neighbors, so just send it to a few nodes. Again - NO BLOCKCHAIN.
4. For each election, you fork a token to use. Then you simply participate in token mixers, like Monero rings. Put all your derived tokens into a hat, then each takes a token and uses it to cast a vote.
You may be wondering, what if someone votes with an “old” token version that hasn’t been mixed. First of all, we can require mixing. And secondly, they cryptographically signed over their token to someone else so when that someone votes with that token, it will override your vote for that token. Since they present your signature in the token history, that you signed it over.
This also allows us to have forms of democracy where you sign over tokens to other people for a timestamp range of, say, the next 1-2 years, to make decisions on your behalf. Better than representative democracy. More like a giant parliamentary system. You may pick a science expert to vote for scientific bills, and a criminal justice reform activist to vote for criminal justice bills.
We can get to near total participation in the democracy this way.
Caveat: although honest validators in each district can construct an eventually consistent Merkle tree by simply finding all validly signed tokens, ordering them lexicographically, and signing them, we DO need a “cutoff” time that they stop accepting offers. This is a Buridan’s ass problem, and it gets even hairier in a Byzantine Generals setting. We need to know that no one submitted a vote after the cutoff time. Thus, we need a two phase commit — each node has to gossip the cutoff time and other nodes have to acknowledge a widely gossipped message or get kicked out of the consensus. There are always edge cases to this — see Ripple’s consensus process for instance — and theoretically in very unlikely cases a “fork” can propagate to the population at large, one person thinking a vote was cast before the cutoff and the other thinking the vote was cast after the cutoff. But unless that handful of votes determines the entire election, that won’t matter. And frankly the same thing can happen even more with current systems.
> When the polls close, members of each county clerk’s staff insert two cryptographically secure thumb drives into the vendor’s administrative portal laptop. Once the two thumb drives are verified, votes on the blockchain are automatically assembled as PDF files for each county. The Secretary of State’s office sends each county one PDF file containing all the marked ballots submitted by voters of that county. The clerk’s staff prints the ballots on cardstock with a ballot printer capable of printing up to 20” two-sided ballots (see Fig. 4). Each printed ballot contains the anonymous ID of the voter (see highlight in Fig. 5). Tabulation and the consolidation of results is done automatically by scanning the paper ballot into the precinct tabulator of the primary voting system (see Fig. 6).
https://sos.wv.gov/FormSearch/Elections/Informational/West-V...
How do the clerks get these thumb drives? What's the protocol for storage until used? Who has access to them? What physical security features do the drives implement?
If I were going to attack this system, the thumb drives seem like a juicy target with plenty of social engineering opportunities.
We do not need this. It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode.
A rundown on some of their security: https://mobile.twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/10266038003653...
It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vote counted, in an anonymous yet totally transparent and verifiable way.
If you want to, you can go to the polling place and observe the box with the ballots all the way through to counting and registering the totals.
That's why some states don't allow you to take a picture of a ballot that you filled out. They're trying to prevent you from confirming that you voted a certain way.
Secondly, there are states where you can vote by mail. Do you know if vote selling is a big problem in those states?
The state republican party still makes occasional claims of voter fraud, but those are exceedingly rare -- something like 54 ballots out of 4 million in the 2016 election cycle -- and they mostly come down to people voting in Oregon and in another state at the same time.
The only reported case of election fraud I can remember was in 2016 and done by a republican, in which she tossed out a bunch of democratic voter ballots. That's it.
For two decades of elections, Oregon hasn't had a problem with election integrity. They do, however, have a consistently high turnout, which they attribute to vote-by-mail.
And this is a real issue, vote buying and cohersion has historically been the most common voter fraud mechanism in the US. It's a major part of how the Boss Tweed and his associates ran New York.
It's not about you selling your vote, it's about coercion. If your vote is verifiable, then you can be threatened with bodily harm for not voting a certain way, and/or for failing to verify that you voted a certain way.
Your freedom to sell your vote is worth less than someone's freedom to vote free of intimidation or threat of violence.
This is less ideal than voting in person for everyone, as it still has failure cases like sufficiently abusive relationships. But it's an overall improvement over the previous system. Significantly more of the population votes in practice, making the vote a better measure of the ever-nebulous "will of the people".
Or have a person follow you and see what you do. Which would've worked all times I've voted here in Sweden.
I'm certainly not going to pay you to vote the way I want without proof of delivery.
The fact that you cannot personally verify whether your vote gets counted is a feature, not a bug.
An example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
You can watch if you want, or even be a part of the counting. IIRC most paper ballot schemes have the counting be public in some form or another, so that opposing factions can call each other out if someone is cheating in some way.
Blockchains for election administration are a digital form of physical chain of custody. Like when you move boxes between locations.
You're thinking of crypto voting schemes. None of which have proven feasible in the wild.
The Australian ballot form of election administration means private voting, public counting. For example, dropping your ballot into a box at a poll site.
Any process enabling any kind of post mortem verification is more akin to accounting, eg open ledger with credits and debts. That's the opposite of a secret ballot.
What.
By voting you commit a change to the blockchain. The system should report back your "commit hash". Said hash is public (as is the entire blockchain), guaranteed to be unique, and counts towards the overall balance.
In contrast - a paper ballot can disappear. Your vote can be manipulated. All without any trace.
Having studied this stuff for over a decade (now inactive), I believe, but cannot definitively prove that paper ballots cast at poll sites is the most robust against attack. FWIW, the election integrity community concurs.
Security research and knowledge has progressed a lot in the last decade. It'd probably be worthwhile to circle back and apply the state of the art to this domain.
(Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well, so it's unlikely that it'll be me doing the work this time around.)
Here's how a Blockchain voting system can work:
1. Person casts vote using a voting machine.
2. Voting machine commits a change to a publicly available blockchain. The commit includes metadata such as the actual choice you made. It can optionally include even more metadata, such as "place of vote", "timestamp", "gender", "age".
3. Your vote has been cast, and the blockchain has been been modified.
4. The voting machine prints a "receipt". Your receipt includes a "commit hash". You can use the hash to see, identify and verify your record has been registered with the blockchain. So can everyone else.
5. When the voting is done - a simple python scripts traverses the blockchain - counting how many votes were given to each candidate.
This design ensures transparency and security. No compromises. You as an individual can know for a fact that your vote has been cast, and has been counted. As a society, we can finally verify and make sure our elections were fair game.
This same model can be extended to the blockchain approach, but isn't using a blockchain to solve the ballot-stuffing problem - just using a conventional paper technique.
Some future system may find a new balance. Perhaps that new system no longer demands a secret ballot. Because the risks changed. (Note that some jurisdictions require a secret ballot, so YMMV.)
So if you want to supplant the Australian ballot with a different system, please start there. Explain the context, assumptions, risks, tradeoffs.
Because piecemeal changes to our existing system, without regard for the whole, has caused a mountain of heartache.
FWIW, I've been pondering "temporary privacy". Perhaps an embargo on all the election data for the critical time span. A friend of mine proposed (draft legislation) making all of the materials and documents available after an election is certified. For post mortem inspection. So you could feed all the ballot images into your own tabulator software. Or do your own signature comparisons. A huge change, because right now election data will be destroyed after certification (exactly when is per jurisdiction).
My polling station is less than 200m away. I have never waited more than two minutes to vote. All voting is with a pen on a paper ballot.
Once the precinct closes, you are allowed to stay and observe the counting. Because each polling place serves only a couple hundred voters, it is easy to follow the counting. As long as it is possible to do so without interfering, everyone can observe so closely they can read the actual ballots and verify that they are sorted into the correct piles. You can then watch the counting of those piles close enough to verify the count.
Later, you can go online and look up the row for your precinct in a spreadsheet.
This is end-to-end verifiability, and it is neither expensive nor unable to scale: A national election in Germany will see about 40 million voters.
What's most important: Unlike blockchain or any other online voting scheme, the whole process is easily understandable by everyone.
In times were every institution is suspected to be corrupt, being merely safe is not enough. It needs to be safe in a way that does not rely on experts in cryptography to say so.
I have seen only one valid objection to using this process in the US: It is far more common there to have elections with dozens of individual races and ballot issues. Germany usually has just two individual questions to be voted on, and maybe five when local and national races fall on the same day. Considering this, it would still be possible to use the process for the top X races on a given election day.
The key issue they try to solve is how to let you check your vote was counted without being able to prove who you voted for to anyone else, thus preventing coercion attacks.
Most of them rely on paper, but some [1], provide reasonable guarantees about online voting.
None of it involves blockchain.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [1]: https://heliosvoting.org/
Vote by mail and extended voting hours are much more effective solutions for people who otherwise couldn't find the time to vote.
Sweden has this plus early voting and we have between 85% and 90% participation in our elections. The early voting of course make it easier to manipulate votes.
I fill out the paper ballot, so no matter what I've voted. It is really clear how to use the system, and I'm not waiting on technology no matter what happens next.
Then I roll it into the machine itself and it goes into a locked box attached to the machine.
There is always a paper record.
The machines and votes are tied together so auditing is straightforward.
In "electionese":
Ballots issued, marked, and cast at a poll site.
Ballots tabulated at poll site the moment the polls close.
All materials and gear distributed from and to a central count.
All handling done in public in the presence of reps of all significant stake holders, election observers.
Receipts, logs, seals for everything.
Source: Was a poll inspector for years.
It's all the security of physical ballots, with the speed of electronic, and very specific / targeted auditing ability that benefits both the electronic and physical domains.
Even as a geek utterly opposed to most all use of computers for tabulation, I came to believe the biggest threat to election integrity is change. We just have to stop shaking the ant farm every few years. Whatever changes are warranted, they need to be slow, deliberate, methodical. Because it all really comes down to the people (admins, voters, candidates, observers, etc), their domain knowledge, expectations, and experience.
As Alistair Cockburn wrote, good people can make even bad processes workable.
PS- Belatedly response, sorry. Got rate limited yesterday.
1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote.
2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-bec...)
3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won?
Aren’t these important enough problems for a democracy to solve?
Instead of simply downvoting, why not actually address what I am saying! I am going to go point by point.
Sure, absentee ballots are a thing, but guess what. People like apps. If it’s secure enough for everyone’s banking needs, why not for a vote?
You can make the same argument about money — that banking apps are a honeypot for thieves etc. And yet we have made banking apps so so secure that you’d use them to move thousands of dollars.
If everyone voted from their phone, it could be anonymous and cryptographically secure. And a Merkle tree would record all results.
What is the issue? Every problem you point out with electronics can be done with paper ballots, too.
The interface can lie to you? Has been done with butterfly ballots and others.
The vote counting process is rigged? Have different groups audit the process.
In fact, having cryptographically secure receipts makes it extra easy and fast to verify votes. Al Gore would have won, because they wouldn’t have has to take so much time for a recount:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ
Instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh, X is an issue!” why not simply work on fixing the issue?
So let’s run down the issues:
1. Not enough access to phones and computers
Fine, people without phones can still vote the old fashioned way.
2. Stealing a phone
A very inefficient way to fake a vote
3. Interfaces that lie to you
Ignoring the fact that machines already do this (https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M) the interfaces would need to be audited by different groups using each other’s interfaces in an anonymous manner (not like when Uber’s greyball https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... ). This is the general problem of the Trusted Computing Base.
4. Anonymity
Listen, should we know how every person voted?? We do now! Thanks Government. Best Voting System Ever (https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-...)
Erm sorry. The solution. Token mixing. You get one token per person, but then they go through a cryptographically securd mixer before being used to sign your vote. Kind of like with Monero rings.
5. Accountability
How can we prove the votes happened the way you wanted them to?
Well, YOU still have your token on YOUR phone (no one else does) so your app can audit the Merkle tree.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs would be overkill here because proving how you voted to someone else is important (See #3, above). In addition, ZK proofs are a bit ivory-tower idealistic since most people don’t have the knowhow to “produce a fake alternative vote”.
The Merkle Tree can consist of smaller branches, one for each district. The results can be tallied in near real time, and verified by anyone. Results would be known in real-time.
6. But realtime reporting will affect voters!
Yes, and it currently already does, with Ohio, Michigan, and so on. The current system makes some states way more important than others:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016
Why not require all states to have primaries at the same time and not reveal the results til the end? This is a political, not technological, solution.
The only one major problem I see with electronic voting is #3, the trusted computing base. I listed the main solution above, but I am sure there will be many improvements on it.
Improved accessibility from the status quo has minimal marginal effect on turnout. https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-e...
> 2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day.
Paper mail-in ballots are a well-established way to accomplish this, though they do have their own risks---specifically vote-buying and coercion. My county in California also allows curbside voting by appointment, which is pretty great for elderly voters.
>3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won?
This is already a solved problem with precinct-counted optical scanned ballots.
I highly recommend you volunteer to be a poll worker the next time there's an election in your state. You'll learn a lot about the real problems on the ground. For example, in my precinct during the 2018 midterms, we encountered an issue with the voter rolls: the city had recently renamed a street but a lot of people's registrations still reflected the previous name, which slowed things down significantly.
Peer pressure, culture of voting (your neighbors noticing they didn't see you at the poll site).
Competitive races.
On the flip, there are many things which counteract vote suppression:
Universal, automatic voter registration (just like all other mature democracies).
Reenfranchise felons.
Fair redistricting.
Adequate funding for election administration.
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I've not seen any data suggesting that digital voting schemes have or may boost voter participation. And there's numerous cases where such systems disenfranchised voters.
- Voting in private on a phone app. The opportunity for coercion is huge. The brilliant thing about putting a cross on paper in a booth on your own and dropping into a box, is no-one knows how you voted - so no comeback.
- Anything in software has the opportunity for a large scale attack. The incentive for doing such attacks is large. Look at all the energy put into gerrymandering etc today - Why risk it?
- the ability to do a sensible audit is beyond most people - auditing a pile of paper is easy - anyone can participate. Software you'd need to trust a small priesthood - that's not democracy, and it's totally dangerous ( forget algorithms, the weak points are people ).
I'd also question your premise that low voter turn out is largely due to inconvenience. Sure for some, but I'd argue lack of participation is largely riven by other factors - like nobody worth voting for....
Finally paper system is easily adaptable - want a box for write ins? Move to single transferable vote? Just print different paper and people doing the counting can adjust - no software re-writes.
How is that true, when I just posted that voter database have been leaked
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-voter-records-from-19-state...
and they contain (per Wikipedia):
Personal data frequently included in a voter database:
Voting history (including federal, sub-national, primary, municipal, or special election voting history)
Name
Physical address
Mailing address
Phone number
Party membership or affiliation
Absentee or military voter designations
Source of voter registration, i.e., DMV/MVA, Public Assistance Office, etc.
Ethnicity or emerges race hypothesis
Gender
Birth date or age range
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_database
Not only that, but some states consider this public information!
If you know how a district voted, why not coerce the entire district? After all, if you have access to unlimited coersion powers, you’d be wasting them on a couple individuals.
I say if someone has the power to coerce others to that extent, we have bigger problems in our democracy. They can, for example, coerce members of the opposing party to stay home and not vote.
In short, I think this is a fantasy problem. There are far easier ways to fake a vote (like this: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/06/gop-was-...) and the app would prevent those.
“All registered Republican voters who submit proof they were home that day will receive $50 cards”
The most additional information you can glean from this is what primary a person voted in anyways. These are just participation history and registration information. Do explain how I can figure out which candidate someone voted for in the general from this information?
So, just make sure you throw out all your extra ballots and you're fine.
Edit: 2016 US General
I won't knock blockchain completely, because I don't believe I'm smart enough to, and it likely has many useful applications, but I feel like half the time I hear about blockchain, this quote is applicable.
Any one wanting to understand why any of these changes occurs will be illuminated by better understanding the business models of the vendors and the appropriations (budgets) of the jurisdictions.
During the HAVA bonanza, which brought us the touchscreens, vendors envied high tech valuations, so repackaged themselves as product companies.
When that fad went bust (market saturation), vendors repackaged themselves as service companies. With a big difference from their prior incarnation. Changing from time & materials to charging a fee for every task for every voter every election.
Before, you'd buy ballots for expected turnout plus 10%.
Now, (with vote-by-mail) you buy the whole ballot packet, for every voter every election.
Before, you'd pay 10 cents for every voter signature verified.
Now, you pay for signature verification services for every voter every election.
It's astonishing how each and every step of the process has been monetized (rent seeking).
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Huh. It just now occurs to me there's probably a better way to summarize the business practices of the vendors:
Just imagine what IT vendors like Oracle do to maximize revenue applied to election administration.
you cannot have one without the other if your intent is to protect the system and to be honest you only need paper ballots as a receipt to allow verification in case of suspected interference. we have already seen that some paper ballot designs are more prone to fraud than others.
1. like paper money, anonymous - my vote should be secret.
2. Hard to do large scale fraud or manipulation - not being efficient or automatable is a feature guys...
3. Physically going to the polls, voting in public, yet private at the end really makes it hard to put pressure on people to vote one way or another. Compare that to voting electronically at home or in church or at work....
?So at some point your vote is printed out on a paper, and scanned? Doesn't seem all that anonymous, for one thing.
"The county clerks were able to conduct a pre-tabulation audit (unprecedented in US election history) by comparing anonymized copies of the voter verified digital receipts with the marked paper ballots prior to feeding the paper ballots into the scanners for seamless tabulation alongside the primary voting system."
We've known for decades how to conduct elections where every vote is provably counted, any individual vote is completely anonymous, and the identity of every voter participant is provable (i.e. preventing ballot stuffing).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
1. Every vote further secures the blockchain voting process. The only way to overcome this is with a 51% attack, so every vote cast further ensures the validity of the entire chain.
2. The chain can be public and anonymous, which gives every voter a verifiable way of understanding their vote. They can look and ensure that their vote was cast exactly as they intended, but it also allows administrators a way to review the votes.
The core part that the article got wrong was that county administrators have a definite way of pre-tabulating as well as tabulating votes.
Isn't the point of the blockchain that you always know?
As far as we know, Voatz could control all the peers in their blockchain making them able to change the vote as they please.
[1] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/06/05/the-west-vir...
Really, all you need is some sort of publicly-defined machine-readable representation of your vote that gets a digital signature locally on your device. You have an open-source app that can sign the vote payload. Then you send the signed payload to the server where it gets added to a plaintext repository.
At this point it would be good to use a signed chain (like git for example) and at this point you "commit" your vote with a timestamp and send the result back to the client. (Commit hash and timestamp.)
Then later, you could just look for the commit sha and timestamp. Of course this means anyone with access to your signature can see who you voted for. Which is a general shortcoming of signature-chain systems.
Another way of doing it might be to have two different blockchains. One has signatures + votes and the other has only the signatures. The one with only the signatures is publicly posted, and the one with signatures + votes is privately audited. The trouble is deciding whether you value anonymity or integrity more.
Of course, in this case it's not clear what the people involved value, since the blockchain is private and just a database that anyone can recreate from scratch at any time.
Since Voatz is basically a private blockchain, there is no way to check that the blockchain was tampered with, or even saved the correct votes, before the it has been made public (which will be after the vote). The only way would be to have a mechanism for people to check if there vote was correctly saved at any point. And this is a very big problem, has having a way to know who vote for who in a democracy is a very very very big no no.
Helios does it far better, and way before all of this "blockchain" hype, no cryptocurrency required.
The initial point of a blockchain was to provide a mechanism for consensus in a system with multiple parties that lack trust for each other and with no Central arbiter.
Can we access this blockchain to view the votes? No? Then it's opaque to us. It's a private blockchain.
...and that's when I stopped reading.
Voatz.
Yes, let's trust a bunch of people who think "Voatz" is a good, adult name for a tool for a crucial part of the process of democracy.