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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots?

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.

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Here's my experience in Germany:

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.

Are you suggesting a way to verify your vote was counted correctly is needed? Wouldn't that provide the ability for folks to sell their vote by being able to show someone else?

No, you already have the ability to sell your vote.

But not the means to prove you’ve held up your end of the deal.

Without proof that you voted a certain way, people are unlikely to pay you.

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.

First, why shouldn't I be allowed to sell or trade my vote?

Secondly, there are states where you can vote by mail. Do you know if vote selling is a big problem in those states?

I lived in Oregon--which has had exclusively vote by mail for decades--for a while and never heard anyone bring up vote selling as a risk to election integrity. No one (journalists, legislators, etc) ever claimed it was happening.

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.

Oregon has a scheme to allow you to replace your mailed in ballot is why.

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.

>First, why shouldn't I be allowed to sell or trade my vote?

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.

In the two states with vote-by-mail I've lived in, you can always hand-submit a paper ballot that takes precedence over your mailed one. The only way someone could be sure you voted one particular way is to monitor your actions for 100% of the time after you mailed the ballot.

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".

Record a video of you voting. It's pretty easy to conceal it if you want to.

Or have a person follow you and see what you do. Which would've worked all times I've voted here in Sweden.

That's not really scalable though. A few people might be able to get away with those schemes, but a few people generally isn't enough to swing an election.

Yes, multiple times for multiple different candidates because there is no way to prove who you voted for. There is a reason nobody does this in practice.

There's no way to verify you voted a certain way, making buying votes less reliable.

Yes, but the question was about the ability to sell, not verifying the reliability of people who engage in this type of illegal activity.

You can't meaningfully sell your vote unless you can prove you voted a certain way.

I'm certainly not going to pay you to vote the way I want without proof of delivery.

Please explain? It's not currently technically possible to provide proof that you voted for a specific person and thus making it impossible to buy votes.

The fact that you cannot personally verify whether your vote gets counted is a feature, not a bug.

You're making this false assumption that proof of voting a certain way is a requirement to sell or buy a vote in the first place. It's not.

There are some ways to do this on paper ballots! They aren't foolproof, but provide optional verification of votes without relying on electronic voting.

An example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

> How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots?

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.

To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.

Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.

You could count the results yourself to double check the outcome with a blockchain-based solution

With a paper-based solution, you (or your organization) can also count the votes yourself. With the added advantage that it's harder to manipulate, less prone to failure, and easier for non-technical people to understand.

Multiple people can't get access to the paper documents at the same time. And when they do get access there's no guarantee that they are getting the actual papers that citizens submitted. Even if you got citizens to individually sign each one with their private key and write the signature on the paper, you still couldn't prove that votes weren't removed

You're right, which is why the paper solution is accompanied by a process of handling involving all of the interested parties.

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.

It doesn't involve all the interested parties and there's no way it could. That's what I'm trying to say. Maybe it's feasible for one watchdog organization to audit one polling station using your method. But it's not possible for every citizen to independently audit every polling station across the country, like you would be able to with the blockchain approach.

Agreed, honestly out of all the different potential blockchain uses this particular solution has always struck me as having the most potential.

A number of end-to-end verifiable voting systems have been proposed and fielded! See [0].

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/

Counting in public is the solution. You can attend the count yourself, or you can trust that the loser of the election will have people there to challenge any questionable moves made in the counting process.

Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted.

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.

> "Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted."

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.

Not in the system they used, it was private. As has been noted elsewhere, it would be trivial to have the majority of peers could be under nefarious control

That's a failure of their implementation. That doesn't discount every implementation. I feel too many here are too quick to dismiss alternative.

It's hard to directly compare the attack surface area of various systems. And yes, ballots have been disappeared, injected, etc. One of the prerequisites of Australian ballot election administration is having sufficient observers. But the same is true of any "trustworthy" process.

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.)

> "I believe, but cannot definitively prove that paper ballots cast at poll sites is the most robust against attack"

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.

Not a fan of the secret ballot?

The problem, I think, is that you couldn't prove votes weren't _added_, unless there's some smart way to solve this problem. Obviously you couldn't inject too many votes or the total would seem suspicious. But considering US election turnout varies you could probably get away with a few percent, which could easily swing a close election.

Common solution with existing precinct tabulators: each voter is issued both an anonymous ballot and a permit with identifying information. After marking the ballot, the ballot is inserted into the tabulator and the permit is retained in a file with the tabulator. At the end of each day, the number of votes recorded by the tabulator should match the number of permits, which contain the identifying information and so can be audited against the pollbooks.

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.

Our current system is the Australian ballot. Private voting, public counting. It's a battle hardened, field tested design which best balances the needs of society with the needs of the individual.

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).

I was actually able to verify that my vote was counted in the last European Parliament election. I voted for an obscure candidate from an obscure party, and my vote sure shows up on https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.htm...

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