The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.
In fact, with a blockchain-based system, the vote could be held in "limbo" until the voter decides to cast it, or you could give the option of creating fake screenshots to deter anyone "buying votes". You can't do this with a paper ballot.
The real problem is compiler and hardware level.
And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it.
If that doesn't show that remote voting is vulnerable I don't know what does...
> And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it.
Or at least miming one, perhaps to provide political cover for Republican-governed swing state legislatures, seeing the problems of in-person voting in the pandemic and armed with the telegraphed disruption of vote by mail as cover and polling data as motivation, to simply exercise their prerogative to cancel public voting and assign a set of Presidential electors without it, which the Republican control of the Senate can guarantee withstand any challenge in the electoral vote count.
If he really wanted electoral chaos by disrupting vote-by-mail, there'd by no reason to telegraph it; the reason to telegraph it is because he desires a response that it either provokes or justifies, as much, more than, or perhaps even instead of the disruption itself.
When you vote right now, your vote is (theoretically) tied to your identity, because every ballot has an id tied to it, so it's not like you'd be giving up any more anonymity than you had. I don't know of any practical fully anonymous election systems that are post-hoc verifiable, but maybe somebody does.
This is insufficient. In-person paper voting allows the voter to toss out their marked ballot and get a fresh one. You can take a photo of your ballot, but it's hard to prove that's what you actually casted. Poll workers will tell you to put your camera away near the ballot box, to protect other voters' privacy as they submit their completed ballots.
The nice thing about blockchains is that once transactions are finalized, the state is known, independently of whether or not the user was hacked. With zero-knowledge proofs, voters could theoretically verify that their "right to vote token" (as I've explained in another answer above) was used to cast a certain vote, without revealing their identity.
Now, if the software they're using is malicious, or their device is vulnerable, the election is screwed.
It's worth noting that Estonia manages digital elections quite nicely with their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system to ensure system integrity
Estonia is more or less unimportant on the global scale. There is very little incentive to manipulate an election from the outside.
This attack also led to the NATO Cybersecurity Center of Excellence being based in Tallinn, and Estonian firms becoming leaders in cybersecurity consulting worldwide. The Estonian example is a splendid example of decentralization and self-sovereign identity done right. All medical records, civil data, banking information, is stored in a decentralized mesh called X-Road.
Finland and other Nordic countries are now adopting X-Road after Estonia's success with it.
If you wish to speak more about this, I'd be glad to, but you're wrong on all fronts. I don't want to regurgitate my blockchain arguments, but if you Ctrl-F this thread for "Right to Vote", you will find my contention about how verifiable, anonymous, and single-vote elections can be held on-chain.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of it. I still thing in-person paper-ballot voting is the most reasonable way to vote.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/data-security-meets-diplo...
The arguments outlined above are really hard to follow, and doesn't really help the blockchain voting case.
Unless something exceptional happened recently, Estonian eID cards are just bog standard ISO 7810/7816 cards.
No blockchain or blockchain-like system involved. Just regular X.509 style PKI. They were even affected by the insecure proprietary RSAlib code a few years ago, like so many others, and all cards had to be replaced.
> The Estonian Government started testing blockchain technology in 2008, as a response to 2007 cyber attacks and with an aim to mitigate possible insider threats. Estonia was the first nation state in the world to deploy blockchain technology in production systems - in 2012 with the Succession Registry kept by the Ministry of Justice.
> Which Estonian state agencies are utilising blockchain technology today?
> → Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications
> → Ministry of Justice
> → Ministry of Finance
> → Ministry of the Interior
> → Ministry of Social Affairs
See their whitepaper here: https://e-estonia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019sept-faq-ksi-bl....
- Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case. - Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts. - Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short. - Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location) - The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules. - The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting. - the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks) - as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room - the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard - results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics - all the results, down the voting district level are available online - I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website - it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not - there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public
This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people.
TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
Volunteer to be a poll worker and to be one of the witnesses during the counting process. You can then watch every step of the process occur openly and see that the votes are being counted accurately.
If you watch the process accurately count all of the vote papers in the box at the end of the day, you can reasonably conclude that everyone's vote in that precinct was counted accurately.
You don't need to volunteer there personally.
But wait... what if everyone assumes the volunteers are mostly ordinary citizens doing their civic duty? What if, in reality, anyone can apply to be a volunteer but the system systematically always chooses its own plants...?
And when you volunteer, as luck would have it they pick someone else "at random".
It's blockchain that makes is impossible for the average voter or even for people with math or CS degrees.