V initiative – Building tomorrow’s secure digital democracy
v-initiative.org
v-initiative.org
A better route is the development of voter-verification, such as Rivest's ThreeBallot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot
He didn't include any crypto, even though he's one of the world's most famous crypto experts, precisely because that would make it opaque to anyone who isn't a cryptographer.
There is a public ledger. The votes are easily verifiable by anyone, on the fly, all you have to do is a client with a nice GUI for the user. The user doesn't care about the crypto, all he wants to know is that his vote counted and that 40 years later, it's verifiable and private.
Bitcoin can do all those things. Actually it solved the most important problems related to e-voting IMHO.
ps. The only not-solved problem is selling votes. With this sort of scheme the buyer could request a proof of vote (e.g. a picture, or something more sophisticated like your user/pass). But this is already happening in Greece and I guess elsewhere too. I'm not sure though if an e-voting scheme would allow this to take a much larger scale. Technology can overcome the lack of social/political education, unfortunately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s
I'm not sure if this is state of the art[0] since the talk is 7 years old. This scheme provides proof to the voter, but not enough so he can prove his vote to someone else, avoiding vote selling altogether.
The biggest challenge IMHO is trust in the system.
[0] I'd appreciate criticism or any other progress in the field.
Decentralization is a key-aspect here. Votes count equally for all citizens. So every citizen has the opportunity to operate a node for the time (48hours) that the elections will take place, in order to inhibit possible corruption. Given the No of organizations, individuals (e.g. political activists, freedom believes, anarchists, you-name-it, conservatives, liberals, you-name-it) and geeks (who will do it for fun, get an RPi, setup a node for the elections, measure traffic, do a JS/CSS3 front-end to display traffic, real-time results etc.)
The government (formed by all parties) should be able to setup an X number of nodes that would allow the elections to take place anyway, without relying to third parties. But third parties will join to ensure reliability of the network.
A government could block the access of nodes from IP netmasks that are located outside the country's IP blocks, to avoid interference of foreign governments[1].
Now, I'm not 100% about the interface and the interaction which is equally important:
* Should the voters use PKI? Should an account be linked with their IDs?
* Should we use a dedicated machine with touch screen and accessibility options in a private chamber?
* Should we use electronic signatures generated by a special 'card' which every citizen should have one?
* etc
There many ways of deployment with pros/cons to be considered on a country by country scenario.
Bitcoin protocol solves the double voting, the possibility to re-count votes, the possibility (which is nowhere today) for citizens to review their votes even years later.
Also we should not underestimate the ability to vote from the comfort of your home, using any device: Imagine how greatly that would improve the % of people participating in the elections for example.
[1] I can't think of what the NSA could come with in this scenario. Would make an interesting discussion.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rivest-TheThreeBallotVoti...
This looks not bad but what I'm failing to understand is:
* Is this an organization or a company?
* Is code open source? Where is it?
* Are they interested in 'corporate voting' schemes or in public voting schemes?
This is a highly problematic claim, I am not aware of any serious security specialist who guarantees any system is 100% fraud proof.
http://v-app.io/landing seems to be the real application behind this, which seems to be a much better and wider version of Doodle, the voting application. If anyone from v-app is listening I don't think you should mix v-initiative.org with v-app.io/organising things in a democratic way.
Any democratic digital vote is in itself 100% fraud, because it lacks two fundamental elements:
1) Completely transparent and verifiable for all voters. 2) The guarantee that anyone can cast their vote free of immediate external pressure.
That's why we have paper ballots and voting booths. Anyone who claims otherwise, anyone who claims this system is merely "outdated" isn't talking about free and democratic elections.
This project is a fraud.
Even if you had a device and protocol that was perfectly secure, if you vote from home, someone else can demand to see you cast it. Or, if it's an app on your phone or a website, there will be an enormous incentive to either monitor your votes or hack them from the rest of the OS.
I've looked into this question a lot and as far as I can tell, there's no way around it. At best, you might be able to distribute relatively secure machines to many places. Maybe every place that has minimal security, like pharmacies or post offices. Or possibly you have some scheme that allows you to repudiate coerced votes later - but that also offers more opportunities for coercion!
That still leaves the problem of verifiability. We might imagine a relaxed standard of verifiability where almost any geeky person can verify the vote is good. I don't have any real ability to verify paper ballots for even a local election, as they are held in a warehouse somewhere. Maybe ubiquity of verification trumps ease of understanding.
This could be achieved by distributing an undivisible votecoin to each registered voter upon presenting their proof of registration or eligibility.
But then there's a weak point of someone giving/receiving more than one votecoin (bribe, threat, blackmail, etc)
Even if there are checks and balances with number of votes vs number of registered voters, there's again the weak point of human element of data entry.
I didn't imagine voting to be like spending a bitcoin. Although that could work too. Issue every voter a single indivisible votecoin. To vote for a candidate send the votecoin to their address.
But, perhaps the V initiative have something else in mind for the blockchain. I'm sure there are others.
I've outlined only two possibilities for using a blockchain here, but I'm sure there will be others.
As I said, why would you rely on a democracy of hashing power for anything when you have unique underlying identities you're trying to let vote? Why use a system designed to allow the decentralized use of a currency without double spending when double spending isn't an issue?
The two biggest issues solved by Bitcoin are double spending and distribution of a decentralized currency. Our would-be voting system doesn't need either of these things.
The system can be rigged with the oldest means possible: a knife to the voters' throat.
I really wish fellow techies would cut this kind of dangerously ignorant and arrogant crap.
We've invented polling stations and voting booths for reasons other than being fucking Luddites. Only in the voting booth behind drawn curtains, an anonymous ballot paper and zero potential electronic surveillance equipment are you free to cast your vote without external pressure and manipulation.
And the result, the counting process, should be observably by any voter, including the ones that don't know shit about software. I.e., the manual counting of ballots.
That's a fucking democracy. Totally secure and yet totally transparent and verifiable.
The rest, like this project, is a self-important sideshow that only serves to undermine true democracy, and half the time that is the actual agenda.
I'm going to install this on my phone and play around with it, and see if I can get some folks in my community involved as well - and see where it goes. Looks very very early but I'd be happy to give it a shot.
Fix that problem first.
Then suffrage won't be necessary at all.