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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

One very important thing most people forget:

If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop.

> Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that.

The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the counting process. You can't check your vote, but you can control all the votes.

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You can make the vote anonymous with electronic voting, in a way only you can verify if you wanted. There are existing voting systems with that property.

> in a way only you can verify if you wanted

But, if "you" can verify it, then "you" can also be coerced into revealing that verification in order to avoid physical punishment (guy with big wrench who /requested/ you vote for A lest he begin breaking knee caps mentioned in a sibling post).

There are ways to provide verifiability without that vulnerability. But since there's no way to prevent the wrench guy standing over your shoulder, I think you could only really solve that problem if you vote in person. If you're doing that I still think blockchain voting is great, but then you should also print out a paper trail and tally that separately. Then you have two overlapping systems with different trust properties and both must be in agreement for the election result to be valid.

There’s so much to be said for voting in person, the reason you stated chief amongst them. However, attending to the polling place on Election Day is very healthy for a community, IME. Also, there’s something virtuous in expecting people to get their shit together enough to walk in on Election Day, so long as early voting is there to accommodate those who cannot make it that day.

The rush to vote by mail (with risk of ballot harvesting, which I saw in my own city (a Republican incidentally) and online voting (with associated risks) seems foolish to me. The secret ballot, completed by oneself in guaranteed isolation, is the pillar of my confidence in our system. Pandemic be damned - it’s not a severe enough crisis (by the number of deaths) to warrant overhauling the system the night before. Feels very much like a useful opportunity to advance an erosion of faith in the electoral system. If I were Russia or China, I would be looking on at the discord with glee right now.

You can already be compelled to do that with your cell phone. People take pictures/videos of their ballots all the time (making it illegal doesn’t stop it).

Someone else mentioned a real/mask vote solution with blockchain so that issue could be solved by electronic voting.

I'd never want electronic voting either, but this myth needs to die. Intimidation can happen with absentee voting too, so it's not a valid concern.

Does it apply at the same level? I could see some ransomware that says if your vote doesn’t appear on the blockchain you are not getting your files back. Meanwhile to achieve intimidation with absentee voting, wouldn’t you have to check the physical ballot in person?

But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand. That's the part that has to be the most secure. With any paper voting system, votes can be impacted by some criminal scheme, yes, but only one at a time and with great individual effort. You have to blackmail a LOT of people to swing an election. Whereas with an electronic election, one attacker can change millions of votes with a single bit of malware code, with nobody the wiser.

>But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand.

The verification is manual, but the counting probably isn't. At least in California, absentee (mail) ballots are exactly the same ones you get at the polling place. You put them in an unmarked envelope, which you place inside another envelope with your information and signature.

The counting center verifies the information on the outer envelope and ensures you didn't already vote elsewhere in-person. If it's good, then the inner (unmarked) envelope is taken out and a machine processes the ballot as if you were in the physical precinct.

Nonetheless, there is a physical paper record of every vote that can be counted by hand, the machine is just for a quick estimate of the count. There are only 2 points of trust in a mail election: the vote itself which could be compromised by blackmail or whatever (low risk because only one vote can be influenced at a time), and the scantron machine (low risk because the ballots can still be counted by hand to verify).

But if your vote is just a byte getting added to a database on a server from your personal computer over the internet, there are a hundred high-risk trust points. You have to trust the user, but also the website, the browser, the operating system, the network, the hardware, the server, the software running on the server and everybody who has ever worked on it, the counting software, the people operating the counting software, and a compromise at any single one of these points could change millions of votes without any possibility of detection.

In other words, in a scantron election, the legal vote is the paper, the electronics are just convenience. In an internet election, the legal vote is the ephemeral machine-generated bits on a wire, and that's where the problem comes from.

In most elections the number of absentee ballots is so small as to be statistically irrelevant. I'm not even certain absentee ballots are always counted because of this, winners are surely announced and concession speeches are made long before absentee ballots are counted. So whatever security/intimidation issues might be higher in absentee ballots aren't that big of a deal due to the small number of them. That may be changing this election with wide spread/universal mail in balloting.

> I'm not even certain absentee ballots are always counted because of this

This is a misconception. All ballots received according to the laws of the state must be counted before the secretary of state certifies the results.

News networks will call an election as soon as they're certain it's gone one way or another. If Trump is up 30% in Wyoming on election night with 500 absentee ballots outstanding, CNN will call it. This doesn't mean Wyoming won't count those ballots. They have to in order to certify the results, which happens a few days after election night. States maintain detailed election results for historical and legal purposes. They don't throw away absentee ballots just because they won't change the outcome.

States will, however, toss out absentee ballots that aren't received according to their laws (i.e., some states require those to be received by election day, while others merely require them to be postmarked), as well as those without a verifiable signature on them.

This is a really common misconception. Absentee ballots absolutely count as long as they're received correctly. States need accurate vote counts. Absentee and provisional ballots aren't "lesser" ballots. They're just subject to some scrutiny before they're counted.

What you’re saying about certification is true but the comment you’re replying to was making the point that the volume is low enough that most elections can be safely called without having completed the count, e.g. you have 5 absentee ballots to count but one politician is up by 20 - doesn’t matter what the absentee ballots say. So while intimidation with absentee ballots isn’t a factor, that comment was saying the now material volume of mailed in ballots creates a greater risk exposure than we associated with the absentee system.

Sorry for offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you some repost invites.

> If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret

This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

Did you stop reading right at the end of the part you quoted?

Yes, not sure how it's related.

if you can verify your vote after it has been counted, you can be induced by a third party to vote for a specific candidate

Yeah, I think it wasn't clear to me as being the point said in the line in question. Guess I can see it now.

The overwhelming majority of the population doesn't have the capacity to understand what you wrote or why that is true. Even the majority of those who understand why it may be true, cannot say for certain that it is true without inspecting the codebase and its operation. That's a major problem.

I mean, you could say the same thing about current electronic voting or even about how aggregate paper voting is counted behind the scenes. Those things involve some level of trust.

I don’t think what I wrote is that difficult to understand. I think you’re underestimating people when you say “the overwhelming majority of the people do not have the capacity to understand what you said.” Really? Not even the capacity to understand?

In any case, the trust involved for a blockchain-based voting system with pseudonymity is much less than the other systems, because they can be 3rd-party audited, or even open source. And that auditing only needs to happen once rather than for each local vote collection method.

Explaining to the end-user is just a matter of communication. That’s not a “major problem.” People don't need to know how a blockchain works just like they don't need to know how UPS works. They just need to know that they're able to place a vote anonymously and verify themselves later if they want to.

In most democratic nations everybody can volunteer to be present at counting. This is in itself a control mechanism, as it would be highly unlikely that meaningful voting fraud would be carried out under the eyes of the observers from multiple parties without anyone making a ruckus.

This is an effective mechanism which apparently convinces enough people that the votes are legitimate.

With blockchain you would have to: - have them understand blockchain algorithms - have them understand computers (so they understand why blockchain might be safe here) - have them understand networking technologies - convince them all of that (and no more/less) is on the actual machines on voting day, for every vote

Have you ever tried explaining what an URL is to your parents? Or how passwords are stored? I am positively convinced that not an insignificant amount of the electorate would just say "there was some hack" when things didn't go their way. And they don't even need to show you proof, because you won't be able to proof the opposite because they won't understand it.

Ultimately to me the benefits of a blockchain system don't really show. It is far to complicated and has too many moving parts.

> Really? Not even the capacity to understand?

Yup. I'm pretty sure most software engineers don't even know how something as basic as hashing works. They just put lego blocks together, without much understanding of even how those lego blocks work.

When it comes to traditional voting, it's fairly easy to understand. You cast your vote, then someone counts them. You don't care how they count it, even if it's with an aid of a machine. You just care that you cast, someone fairly counts.

With a blockchain, there is no person involved and there is no counting. You vote and some piece of software that most software engineers don't even understand tells you who won. That is really not going to engender trust from anyone, not even software engineers.

I work on blockchains all the time and even I wouldn't trust that thing. Good luck convincing someone who doesn't even know how to reboot their iPhone.

Or if they are forced to reveal it under duress, or they choose to reveal it to get paid for the result, etc.

> Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.

Which means the owner can be forced to reveal their vote to a spouse/boss/warlord.

I could have been clearer that that is what I meant.

Yes, that makes more sense and I think that's a valid point, thanks.

To be fair I thought you meant that it couldn't be kept secret from a global view - that anyone who wanted could look at the blockchain and attach votes to identities.

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