> cryptographic signatures and valid IDs could have made it FAR more secure
No it wouldn’t, it would make attacks at scale easier. The gold standard is physical ballots with electronic scanning.
No it wouldn’t, it would make attacks at scale easier. The gold standard is physical ballots with electronic scanning.
With paper ballots around the world there are already attacks at scale. Take the latest national election in the USA. Republicans claim that Democrats shipped in fake mail-in ballots or harvested them from old people, and said “trust us”. Democrats claim that Republicans closed polling stations and disenfranchised many voters at scale in districts that historically voted Democratic.
Witness all the rigged elections around the world, some strongmen getting 99% of the vote at scale. What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won? Is an average person going to be able to somehow know what happened in their own pollung station after they left, let alone across the entire country?
Having mutually distrusting parties have access to each other’s work is the very thing that enforces byzantine consensus but it can be checked and verified on-chain as each party signs off on the result, so anyone can check that 1) they looked at it and 2) they were satisfied. That’s far far better than hearing someone say “it went fine” about paper ballot recounts.
Furthermore, everyone being able to make sure their vote was counted by eg checking Merkle Proof is far more secure.
None of the above failure modes would be an issue if everyone who wanted to, could vote from their computer, scanned the QR code with their phone to verify their choice, and signed with their private cryptographic keys derived from their IDs.
Claims won’t change with a tech fix.
The point is there still isn’t evidence of wide-scale disruption. Electronic-only voting changes that from a verifiable problem to an inherently-unverifiable one. You only know the code voted, not the person.
> What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won?
Crypto ballots wouldn’t change this. If anything, I expect crypto voting to soon feature in authoritarians’ elections.
People in rural areas whose polling station closed thanks to Republicans, and who can’t drive 30 miles to the next one wanted to use the mail-in ballots. And Democrats were very happy to allow it. But then Republicans pointed out all the ways the mailing system and ballot harvesting was very unreliable. And both sides have a point. Taken to the extreme, both disenfranchisement and physical mail suck for voting.
In contrast, people could have an option to vote from their computer and use their phone to scan the QR code and confirm their vote and sign it. They can then verify their vote was included correctly!
I have explained at length how crypto would make it a lot more verifiable and reliable.
Everyone would be able to check:
1) their own vote was counted in their district
2) their own district was counted in the total
3) the number of votes and turnout in each district, matching the number of signed checkins
4) mutually distrusting parties in each district saw each ballot being cast (or a random sample) and were satisfied that the electronic record matches whatever receipt was generated
None of these can be directly verified by nearly anyone participating in a paper election.
Besides destroying the secret ballot, you can do this now! You look at the paper and the electronic count. If you’ve been a poll worker or observer, you know there are hundreds more checks a well-designed system has.
> Everyone would be able to check
Few people would be able to check any of this. (Fewer than can observe a poll today.) And it’s much easier to invent a “hack” that makes people distrust an electronic ledger than a paper one folks can audit ex post facto [1].
There is no similar audit capability for a blockchain. Did the person actually vote that way? Or was their phone hacked? Short of re-polling everyone, you cannot know.
Remotely coordinating a poll attack on paper ballots where every precinct has its own system is impossible. Crypto voting is a textbook tragedy of trying to solve a social problem with a band-aid of technology.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_preside...
1) even if so, can I check my vote recorded at the district vote collection center is the same as the vote I meant to send?
More importantly, can I check the resulting numbers announced on TV/radio/online are the same as the sum of all legitimate votes, and not influenced by illegitimate votes, and not doctored?
This is all impossible, in any system of voting.
Ultimately, you do need to rely on your co-citizens to help verify that the elections are valid (in a simple to verify system, i.e. paper voting), just like you need to rely on them to vote coherently and to abide by the results of the election.