https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill...
This article voices the general opinion I’ve read from technologists and those who’ve studied networked voting systems. The problems all boil down to any software-based (i.e. non-paper-based) voting system will almost certainly contain bugs, and this will allow elections to be influenced by a few persistent hackers.
Maybe this is where blockchain-based systems could help push such systems forward, by effectively giving a worldwide bounty for voting software. After many years and 0 hacks, we could be pretty confident that this particular piece of solidity code is solid and could be used as part of an Internet voting scheme.
Though, the moment you have a frontend (which you will of course need to interact with the smart contract) you’re back to square one because of all the millions of lines of code (uh oh, bugs!) that are necessary to be executed in order to display a form on your screen.
Maybe it’s a good thing you were discouraged from this bleak area of research, who knows. I’m sorry you were discouraged like that.
(Scrutineer might be a poll-watcher in the US?)
I observed the "audit" of my county's VVPAT. When the printout was found to be illegible, the admins just printed another copy. Proving, at best, the printer occassionally worked.
My county trashed our touchscreen voting machines.
Sadly, vendors, technophiles, and a certain type academic, remain undaunted in their enthusiasm for unverifiable elections.
Eg Adjudication of postal ballots, at scale, isn't any better than the touchscreens they replaced in that regard. How hard could it be? Well, the stack my county uses, for "efficiency", fully digitizes the audit trail.
We already know how to do this, it's policy that the hard part at this point from my understanding.
Did anyone ever solve the issue of vote verification (a voter being able to verify that their vote was counted) being a massive threat to vote secrecy? ie they're threatened to vote for Candidate X by a group and forced to show a verification they did?
>have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity.
Seeing as how disinformation is a gigantic problem these days, this is a better use of their time than trying to reinvent a wheel that already works. Implementing a transparent verifiable blockchain backed voting system will not reduce election fraud conspiracy theories because those belief systems were not arrived at through rational logic in the first place.
My proposal was for provable voting systems in conflict regions. It stems from my experience on the ground supporting the 2014 election in Afghanistan. People all over the world risk their lives to vote, and they, normal primitive farmers with no education, demand proof that it was done fairly. The current method is a line of people showing their hands, then one by one, marking a wall and walking out with purple thumbs.
But really, the place and the situation is irrelevant. I find your response both abhorrent and stereotypical.
The academics are right and you're wasting your time, sorry.
And imagine an academic suggesting that it's not practical. The most celebrated academic result of the last 25 years in the field was a crypto system that would take a thousand years to multiply one-bit numbers.
Regardless, you're right. It is a waste of time. There's no funding. Academia is like consulting. You make money by telling people what they want to hear. I've become more aware of this.
I really hate this attitude. This is a very common belief held by non-technical people. They believe that it is impossible to have perfect security, and that every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers.
I truly believe one day a cryptographic voting system will be rolled out, but it's a long way away, not because for technical reasons, but for cultural reasons.
> They believe that it is impossible to have perfect security, and that every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers.
Yes. I do believe that.
...or it's not worth hacking -- this is what your statement leaves out.
Nobody is going to be searching for bugs in cat(1) when there are bigger prizes out there.
There's the keyword.
And that day is not today.
Paper is fine. Let's use paper.
These voting machines that can be tracelessly hacked with a pen drive are terrifying, and no, there isn't enough awareness of that fact among people.
Paper doesn't impart any security property by itself. Can paper be used in a secure system? Maybe. Can a machine be used in a secure system? Maybe. Is all paper secure? No. Is any machine secure? No. Same for blockchain, mobile, internet, satellite, and ouija boards.
Do you have them on paper?