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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible, terrible idea. 98% of the voting population has no clue how blockchains even work. And as we're seeing in realtime, if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process, they will immediately attribute the results to fraud (this is bipartisan, btw... remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016?)

Election systems need to be simple and transparent above all else, and old fashioned paper ballots that can be counted and audited by hand (if necessary) are the best way to achieve that.

Any automated system, whether using blockchain or the existing electronic voting systems, is hopelessly opaque and serves only to decrease confidence in our democracy.

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I'm not sure I buy this argument. What needs to be transparent to people is how votes are counted, not the logistics of how they are communicated and stored. People are doing pretty well where other countries have much more complicated systems (look at Australia having used IRV for over a hundred years. IRV has many rounds of voting and is substantially more complex).

If your goal is full transparency of every component, I don't think a lot of people here could understand that. There's a lot happening and to understand everything at a low level takes a lot of expertise. Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. Something we have to do regardless of full transparency, because someone could in fact hire a bunch of people to rig things.

The problem is the breakdown of trust. Fox has been talking about voter fraud for well over a decade and while they do have clear examples, they are over inflated at their significance (sorry, one person counting twice does not constitute a rigged election with a million voters. It constitutes a mistake). The president has a devout fanbase and echos this rhetoric from a very privileged platform. The problem is trust. There's the old saying "trust but verify." The transparency is the ability to verify, but does not require that every person is able to. So don't needlessly tie your hands behind your back.

> Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust.

A lot more trust than the current system, where voters and observers can at least believe what their eyes see. With a digital system nothing they see happening necessarily means anything! They can't verify it, and thus they shouldn't trust it.

I'm not sure this is meaningfully different than what currently happens. Can you expand on this more? Currently we don't have paper trails. We don't have good ways to verify that our vote was counted and that it has the correct value to it. An immutable data structure helps solve this, especially if it is auditable.

I'm all for paper trails, and I think they are necessary, but our current system isn't exactly transparent either. Logistically this is impractical. We've always relied on a subset of people to tell us it is trustworthy. I.e. the volunteers that count. If you can have that and do cryptographic arithmetic so that anyone with a computer can verify the results, that's more transparent, not less.

I mean I think there's this idea that people counting physical ballots in a rushed and hectic environment has high accuracy. That sounds like a naive assumption to me. But what is that error? 0.5%? 1%? For the most party elections are not won by that margin and when they are a recount is issued (and low and behold, numbers change slightly. Proving that the counting is imperfect but good enough).

I'm not defending the blockchain solution posted here but I do think the electronic voting aspect of the current system is at least as bad to lay people. Existing machines are often old, unpatched, and a big target that is mostly protected by people in the room looking for odd behavior or worse.

I think we need a more secure system to expand options for electronic voting and counting but it needs to have a paper backbone for true reliability.

Ah, when I say “current system” I mean paper ballots. I forget that the US sometimes uses machines :(

> remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016?

The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won.

I think Turkey can be a great example in this regard. No one trusts the opposing parties with cheating, so every single vote is watched by six parties simultaneously during the count:

1. There are paper ballots thrown in the cases

2. After the election ends, the votes are counted openly. It is a constitutional right to be there and watch while votes are counted.

3. After the count ends, the tally is written down and posted for anyone to see. People take pictures of the tally in order to upload into a central database - be it a party's or an unaffiliated third party's

4. The cases are then shipped to the election committee, which aggregate the results. They also post the results of each case, so that anyone can check against the database and contest of there are mistakes.

The whole process is open to be checked by everyone and since trust is so low these days, everyone keeps track very closely. Even in Turkey's conditions, this gives some kind of peace of mind.

The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won.

No they aren’t.

You're describing exactly what happens in (most) of the US.

The "fraud" alleged by Trump in this case consists mostly of his observers being asked to stand 6 feet back so the election officials could actually work. And the officials themselves are selected from each party.

My assumption was that it was so they couldn't read identities on postal ballots. Another claim of fraud was that they were not allowed to photograph the ballots.

Fraud would be a more worrying concern if they were allowed to photograph ballots.

In some states it's illegal to photograph your own ballot due to concerns of vote selling and coercion.

The distance thing is complicated. I assume it's in reference to Pennsylvania. 6 feet was due to COVID-19 social distancing rules but watchers were actually originally segregated much farther away (at least in Philadelphia). I think the PA Supreme court overturned the 6 feet thing and watchers are farther away again but unsure.

I don't think PA law actually says how far watchers have to be. https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/li/uconsCheck.cfm...

Some of the complaints are fair. For example, IANAL but the PA law clearly states that mail-in ballots have to be received by election day.

The inability to prove you voted on a specific candidate is an integral part of a democracy. Privacy within a voting booth allows such, and any tools which take such privacy away (most commonly using a smartphone or camera) are therefore not allowed in a voting booth.

> For example, IANAL but the PA law clearly states that mail-in ballots have to be received by election day.

If it clearly states X you might as well link to it.

From what I understood they can allowed if the votes were cast in time (which a stamp proves), even if received a few days later (though with a deadline).

It seems pretty clear that one would not be allowed to photograph ballots when their identifying envelopes haven't been removed yet... The secret ballot is still a thing in most states.

6 feet. 6 feet is approx 2 meters, which is about the distance you need to keep for COVID-19. That alone is a valid reason to keep your distance; we don't want those who are counting votes to become ill (or worse), thereby slowing down the progress.

I'm a regular counter in Dutch elections, and observers should not interfere with counters (such as photographs, talking, noise, etc). It gives them unnecessary stress which reduces their output. Leave these people alone, let them do their job.

This so much.

We know paper ballots work perfectly. It's very difficult to commit fraud and as you say, can be audited easily.

Adding layers upon layers of complexity on top of that is not the way.

Gore might disagree with your assertion that paper ballots work perfectly. And the question about sharpies, this year, throws a question in there. Personally I would love to see digital voting. But paper ballots do leave a paper trail that is much more difficult to change. But they aren't perfect.

Tracking votes with a blockchain doesn't necessarily mean eliminating paper ballots.

Then what is it for? I wouldn't like an immutable registry of everybody's vote stored forever.

If so, the blockchain is completely redundant, and as such presents cost, complexity and unnecessary overhead.

Isn’t this more an implementation problem than anything? People live their lives by encryption every day - and even have surgeries from remote doctors. I’m sure a secure way to reliably vote via electronic means could be implemented, if funding it were a societal concern. Granted, I’m thinking it’s probably just cheaper to rely on the minimum wage and volunteer work as we do now.

> if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process

I agree that we should make the process simple and transparent so that others can verify it, but not because we want the truth-denying anti-science megalomaniac to concede (they won't in the face of hard truth and facts); but because we can have other experts in the field peer-review it.

It's both. Reasonable people would have good reason to distrust a voting system that you'd need a graduate degree to understand the mathematical underpinnings of.

This is non-sensical. Right now, there are voting systems on computer and on paper. All of them are fraudulent. And auditing them are difficult if not impossible. Time vs money.

Blockchains provide a mechanism to audit and eliminate fraud.

For example, by only allowing one vote per person. And allowing the person who voted, to confirm their vote was not changed or tampered with.

Paper ballots guarantee nothing.

You seem to be starting from the prior position that existing voting systems are fraudulent. This is not the case (at least for paper ones, I too am skeptical of purely electronic voting systems.)

Both initial counting, recounting and auditing is quite straightforward. For example, Risk Limiting Audits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit) are easy to do and provide extremely high degrees of mathematical certainty that an election was not tampered with.

One of the most common failings I see with technical people is the belief that technology should be applied to solve problems, even when those problems are pretty minimal and the application of technology could make them worse.

In the US, electoral fraud is not an important issue. Fraud exists to some extent, as in every country, but the scale of it is so small that it’s not a thing worth solving. The application of an opaque and difficult to understand technology to the problem offers no appreciable benefits and comes with its own baggage.

The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID. There is no appreciable benefit, and some obvious costs.

> The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID

VoterID makes perfect sense and is used in some parts of the UK already for 20 years. How anyone can possibly object to it, especially given how many and varied options are acceptable, astounds me.

How many of those options work without an address? Moreover, many states do signature verification, which beyond being complete garbage as far as verification goes, has huge false negative rates. I once spent half an hour arguing with the bureaucrat that that the signature she had just seen me make was actually mine.

> states

It's a discussion regarding the UK.

The problem with Voter ID isn't the ID itself, per se.

It's a problem when coupled with very active, intentional voter suppression from those who control what forms of ID are acceptable, and how easy it is to obtain them, which is known to vary across demographics.

None of this is controversial: I live in North Carolina and the courts have repeatedly struck down Voter ID implementations from the (supermajority Republican) state legislature because the implementations "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision."

It makes no sense, because it solves no problems and serves only to disenfranchise people. I can see no argument in support of it whatsoever.

So it should be removed from Northern Ireland? France should stop doing it? Italy should just forget about it? Canada should pick a new system? Perhaps the Dutch have it all wrong too.

Such unsupported conspiratorial vagueness about disenfranchisement, equally tired and transparent a duplicity, seeks only to assert I believe an underlying hope/fear that there is some systemic problem that might be unwound. For it makes no sense to shore up a system once designed in a world were communities knew each other better to remove any question of doubt from that component of the process.

Are the people of Northern Ireland disenfranchised at the polls? France too?

I think not

This unsupported argument that it had no problems is nonsense. You want to introduce a system that disenfranchises people? Then explain why it’s needed. That’s on you.

And yes, voters in areas with ID laws are disenfranchised. Voter ID laws can routinely be observed to disproportionately affect people who are otherwise legitimately able to vote. You may, in some clear and well-scoped circumstances, be able to make an argument in support of them when they solve some problem. NI might even be an example of that. Since electoral fraud does not appear to be a problem in the rest of the UK, it does not seem possible to avoid a net negative impact.

> Since electoral fraud does not appear to be a problem in the rest of the UK

Without VoterID it's literally impossible to know it's scope

> introduce a system that disenfranchises people?

It doesn't. Do you even know how the process works?

I don't see how a blockchain mechanism could prevent some of the fraud being alleged today (all on extremely shaky grounds) like bribing voters or people voting for others.

Wouldn't national identity cards with 2fa be a requirement?

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