Comment by wanderingbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wanderingbit | Hacker News Reader

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I’m not sure why the academics are discouraged , but there are non-technical reasons to discourage you (and all of us) from trying to use Internet-based voting systems for important elections:

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.

Well said. That is the thing with all of these other on chain schemes for everything from real estate to food tracking to voting. It doesn't even matter how secure the voting/tracking part is, the chain can't actually provable tie to something in real life. And as you said, it is an attack vector. People can vote in important things and there can be fraud but when you have paper and many layers of verification and audit-ability, wide spread fraud isn't possible. Too many people have too much of the information.

This is an extremely weak straw-man argument. It doesn’t need to be on the blockchain, mobile, or even the internet. You can print out the cryptographic proof on paper if it pleases you.

How many scrutineers would be able to verify that paper? Let alone normal voters.

(Scrutineer might be a poll-watcher in the US?)

I imagine anyone who runs the mobile app could probably open the camera and scan it.

How do you convince them the mobile app is doing what it says? There are so many layers of things that are completely invisible to a human without using other computer tools. Paper physically moving is way easier to understand and watch.

It's turtles all the way down with this crap.

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.

Good question. The mobile app’s source code has been inspected by independent subject matter expects.

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