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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we just have block-chain based voting where the vote is secret, but you get a paper receipt, and you can run open-source code (like scan a QR code) to check the blockchain if your vote was counted the way you expected. Everything is immutable, and cryptographically verified.

Block-chain seems to be a failure for money so far, but voting seems like the killer application. The technology is there, well understood, there are even companies that offer a solution along those lines. Why don't we use them? Isn't it so much better than electronic voting machines in every way?

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Because if you can check how your vote was counted, you may be coerced to check it with, say, your boss standing behind your back - so, your vote is no longer secret.

But, of course, voting by mail is even worse, and most of the US seems to not care about it a slightest bit.

Or sell your vote, that'd be a way for the wealthy to more directly take control of society.

I'm sure there's solutions to that though, either technical or legal.

That will let you verify that your vote is counted, but is there any way to verify that additional votes are not manufactured?

To start you'd want voters to register first I think, so you can't just invent people, at least not without being able to infiltrate the systems that manage birth certificates, tax records, and social-security ids.

That raises the question of how do you avoid double-voting or voting for people who didn't vote. I think there's technical solutions to both.

Even if there is registration, that only helps if I can verify that the entire chain only includes registered people. So how can I verify everyone who voted is registered, without also knowing which vote is from which person?

Maybe have a separate record for "this person voted" and another record for "1 vote for X", with encrypted references back and forth? Then you could at least verify that there are an equal number of both records, that all the identities are valid and only used up to once, and tabulate the final results. It would still be possible for someone who didn't vote to have a false vote logged, but that is a more narrow attack.

It's an interesting idea, but I am skeptical of any system that requires voters to do the verification themselves after the election is complete. I suspect that there wouldn't be enough people to actually do that to make any sort of difference.

I think you'd do it in a way that you can verify your own vote, but nobody else's, the government can see all the votes, but not who voted what, so they're private. Then you'd have some kind of confirmation system (e.g. paper receipts which are kept at the polling stations and statistically sampled to look for irregularities. You wouldn't have to check every receipt to be sure there was no funny business to a high degree of certainty.

I don't see how that addresses my concern, though. What I'm saying is that a system that relies on the voters themselves to validate that their vote was properly recorded is a system that won't work, because voters won't do that in sufficient numbers.

Statistically, you wouldn't need many people to validate it to have high confidence there was no funny business.

But you would need to ensure that your sample was statistically representative, which means that you shouldn't allow voters to self-select whether or not their vote is in the sample.

I would add that (at least in my state), validating a sample of votes to provide an indication of a problem has been done for at least as long as I've been alive, so we already have that. But my state doesn't use electronic voting machines.

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