Hacker News Reader

Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

I am not a libertarian and do not have a political agenda, but it is imaginable that certain parts of the government could be replaced with the structure like this one.

I don't know how the transition could happen, but at the end, the mining in the network will be done by citizens, bitcoins will be named "bitvotes", and every citizen will mine those bitvotes, or they could be distributed fairy (one bitvote to each citizen). Then, the citizens could vote about anything with those bitvotes, and the bitcoin technology ensures that the voting is provably fair and verification of the correct voting results doesn't require any third party.

But again, this is not my agenda and I don't know if it would be good; I just say that the bitcoin technology invention allows this to happen.

View on HN

Such a scheme has a huge flaw: it allows extortion/coercion. Suppose I am a mob boss and I wish to become (insert position here). I send my goons to inform you that voting for me is a wise decision because I can offer you protection from the vicious thugs in the area. It would be a shame if the vicious thugs burned your house down, wouldn't it?

So, you'd be forced to reveal your bitvote address to me under threat of violence. Once you vote, I just check that you voted for me. And if you didn't...

A real cryptographic voting system goes to great lengths to prevent this scenario. In such a system, a voter can prove to himself that his vote counted toward the proper party, but crucially the voter cannot prove such to anyone else. This prevents coercion.

Of course, real cryptographic voting systems have a bunch of other nice properties, but this is a really major one that most people overlook.

Example of a cryptographic voting system: Helios (https://vote.heliosvoting.org/). Also see the tech docs (http://documentation.heliosvoting.org/verification-specs/hel...). Helios is an online system, so it's not ready for prime-time voting --- it would need to be adapted into an in-person scheme, which cryptographers have already created --- but it does demonstrate the concepts involved.

This is an area of active research, BTW.

It's not a huge flaw, since our current voting system (in any country you care to name) allows exactly that, and your scenario is not observed in the wild, since it is illegal.

It's such a blessing that nothing illegal is ever observed in the wild.

i don't think you properly understand the objection. the mob boss may threaten but cannot legally know what you vote

The typical US voting system allows coercion? When I voted, I went into a publicly visible booth, recorded my vote, pressed submit, and went about my business. I suppose I could have been forced to take a picture with a cellphone, but I could have just selected the option they wanted, taken the picture, and then swapped back to the candidate I wanted. Is there something I'm missing here? Any way you slice it, even if the current system allows coercion, if we're talking about cryptographic voting systems, we might as well use ones that don't suffer the same issue.

> your scenario is not observed in the wild, since it is illegal.

I don't mean to be snide, but I've witnessed a great deal of illegal things, so "since it is illegal" is not that convincing.

Even if you discount the threat of violence because of the possibility of police intervention (e.g. you report being threatened), consider the notion of vote buying: a rich person just says they'll pay you lots of money to vote for them. This isn't necessarily something people would want to report, given the possibility of financial benefit, especially if the person is down on their luck.

At any rate, if electoral fraud is something that is "not observed in the wild", people sure do make a big fuss over it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud for some references).

You perhaps are not aware of absentee voting.

Ah! Of course. You're right. I've never used an absentee ballot, so it completely slipped my mind.

This is actually why Helios voting (which is end-to-end auditable) doesn't prevent coercion either: your voting is done 'at range' (online), so a coercer can just stand over your shoulder. Just about the only surefire way to prevent coercion is to somehow physically give someone security while voting.

Okay, well, anyway, my point still stands; even if coercion is possible in the current-day low-tech system, if we're going to discuss a cryptographic replacement, we might as well restrict ourselves to the baseline "best-studied" ones so far, virtually all of which include coercion-defeating mechanisms.

At a minimum, if a physical presence were the norm with cryptographic voting and there was an option to be absent (like today), then we would be in an identical scenario with regard to coercion while gaining the end-to-end auditability of the cryptographic scheme. It seems like a net positive, although many critics of cryptographic voting see the increase in complexity as unworkable.

Voter fraud just isn't a large problem, no matter how much some people would like it to be.

> Is there something I'm missing here?

You're missing the fact that it's very possible to use coercion to discourage certain groups from voting at all. Just target the groups that are likely to vote for your opponent, and you've essentially used coercion to manipulate the election.

This is a problem which would be solved, somewhat ironically, by the US adopting mandatory voting. Shift a really nominal fine onto "not voting" (like $30), and it will become politically impossible to get away with marginalizing groups from voting.

Because people might ultimately think "well my vote probably wouldn't have mattered" when the line is 8 hours long on a Tuesday, but they will definitely care when they get fined $30 - but they're not going to simply argue the fine should go away, because it will be a little reminder of "oh yeah, and you didn't get a say in your government either!"

Mandatory voting might solve that problem, but it might introduce others.

Such as?

Australia has mandatory voting as do other countries. We don't have problems with it.

If I were Australian, I would have a problem with it, because I am what you might call a principled abstainer. But apart from personal issues regarding perceived rights violations, there are several obvious advantages and disadvantages, similar to any aspect of election design. I'm not saying compulsory voting is game-breaking, but merely that it's a compromise that one could argue is not desirable.

You're under no obligations to actually vote in Australia, just to show up. You can freely get your name ticked off, put a line through all the candidates and write "try harder" and walk out.

Fair enough. It's hardly the worst idea I've ever hear of, nor the most upsetting to be personally (the fact that "modern" Western governments still reserve the authority to perform military conscription is far worse). I would still prefer not showing up for paying the fine.

What about jury duty

I'm not a fan.

When I lived in Ecuador long ago, voting was mandatory. The people with your views ran a spirited campaign with posters that said "VOTA NULO", vote null. I'm not sure exactly how it worked there, but in some places there's an explicit "vote for nobody" choice, and those choices are counted and reported: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voto_nulo

Actually, people can and do sell votes this way in places in Italy. How they do so is extensively documented. It's one of the reasons that cameras are supposed to be strictly forbidden in voting booths - so they can't take a picture verifying how they voted.

>it allows extortion/coercion. Suppose I am a mob boss and I wish to become (insert position here). I send my goons to inform you that voting for me is a wise decision because I can offer you protection from the vicious thugs in the area. It would be a shame if the vicious thugs burned your house down, wouldn't it?

How is this different than what currently happens?

Our current voting system has an emphasis on the secret ballot.

There are records of which polling place a person voted at, and whether they showed up to vote, but (in theory) there's no way to tell which of the thousands of ballots from that polling place match to which individual voter.

But there is also no way for us the verify a valid and safe vote. Especially with our lively die bold machines. I'll take the thugs, give me a fair vote.

Or you know, just get rid of the diebold machines and do a hand count?

Whose hands?

People from several parties, in a public, observed location. It's not hard; it works here in the UK, and it worked in the US before all this voting machine nonsense started.

You can still use coercion to discourage certain groups from voting, which has happened plenty of times throughout history.

So? That's not solved by a bitcoin voting system either.

I think there is a simple way to counter-act vote buying/coercion: if the voter has a mechanism to cheat the cheater. If I can accept a hundred bucks to vote A, then walk around the corner and change my vote to B in secret, it creates sufficient disincentive to buy or coerce votes.

You mean, exactly like the system we use in the real world?

I explore some of the possibilities of achieving transparency and trust in government through blockchain records here: http://www.wallstreetcrypto.com/2013/12/distributed-anonymou...

Voting is a solved problem. I’m not saying that the idea of using bitcoin technology to solve problems beside monetary systems is a bad idea (in fact, I think it’s a very interesting concept), but really, democracies around the world already have established and efficient voting systems that work well enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

(Admittedly over a decade old now)

I think the point is that our current voting systems require a measure of trust, where a blockchain based system could be trustless.

This is the key point where the public blockchain seems to be of use for voting: transparency, which we have zero of in current machine systems.

Yes, but you need a trusted authority.

But I probably didn't explain it well enough. I didn't mean that you would vote which politicians will rule, you would vote on concrete decisions state such make. Nowadays, you vote politicians and they make decisions, and with blockchain network, you would directly vote for such decisions, making the politicians an unnecessary layer. ;-)

I hire politicians for the exact reason that I cannot possibly become informed and make intelligent decisions on all of the issues that affect me.

And you expect them to be able to?

I expect them and their staffs to do it, yes. Some do it better than others.

You could solve that problem by reading your politician's blog (and donating of course) then voting the way they recommend on each issue.

Fair enough, but isn't it just a matter of granularity at that point? How many things do I want to be voting on every day? 1 thing? 10 things? 100?

It's extremely easy to debate whether voting is a solved problem or whether it works well enough.

I would argue that money is also a solved problem.

If what you're saying is true, then I'd like to know why Instant Runoff Voting seems so superior to binary voting schemes (like "democratic" or "republican" with the occasional "green" candidate acting usually as "democratic spoiler") and yet hasn't been widely implemented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Ah, then everyone will be bitvoting for the candidate that will get them the widest-screen TV possible.

That is a fundamentally bad idea.

Votes and "dollars", what ever your concept of dollar is, should never be the same thing.

I assume you're against all forms of lobbying, then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com