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Comment by dmvaldman | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a great application for cryptocurrencies, though maybe better with those using proof of stake rather than proof of work.

Distribute one coin to every citizen (this is the hard part). Each citizen votes anonymously by giving the coin to the candidate of their choice. The network verifies that no coin (vote) is spent (cast) twice. Done.

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That only solves one part of a large problem.

You still have solve

* How to stop someone from coercing your vote by being there while you vote

* How to distribute the coins evenly

* How to ensure that the vote was cast by the person you gave the coin to

* How to ensure that nobody can find out who you voted for afterwards

Many cryptocurrencies have your last two points as part of their design.

For the first one, I see the value in going to a centralized place that has taken measures to make sure there is no coercing involved. Someone with a gun could indeed come to your home, and make you vote for a certain candidate. I don't have a good answer for this, but I do feel that it would be a difficult strategy to pull off, as citizens can vote at any time, from any place.

For your second point, this is indeed the hard part. It can be rephrased as: how can you be sure no one was given 2 coins? I also don't have an answer here that doesn't make you associate an SSN or another unique identifier with a wallet address, which would ruin the anonymity feature. Maybe someone else reading has some good ideas to add?

"but I do feel that it would be a difficult strategy to pull off, as citizens can vote at any time, from any place"

The coercion could and would take the effect of requiring you to vote while the coercier was watching you. If you voted before then, you'd suffer the consequences.

This is an absolute bar to on-line voting as far as I'm concerned; in the US it would likely spark the hot civil war we're sliding towards.

Is there a difference with absentee ballots?

Nope, which is one of the reasons they're the target of many if not most current US voting scams.

> The coercion could and would take the effect of requiring you to vote while the coercier was watching you. If you voted before then, you'd suffer the consequences.

Yes, and it's not the "gun to the head" type scenario but voting with family, partners, friends that would be more typical. Or voting at work, knowing your boss is right next to you and hates party X that you want in...

Voting on paper in a booth is antiquated and low-tech, but it works. It's simple, pretty easy for interested parties to watch for misconduct, understandable by everyone. It's hard to fake on a large scale, too.

I think we need some kind of Zero-knowledge proof[1]: "a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true."

In the case of voting, we want to be able to prove that a person voted, with no knowledge of the actual vote. If you can count the number of votes cast that should be enough to be confident in the result.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

That actually seems like an interesting idea, but I'd like for the public to be able to view the list of unique coins for each candidate and verify theirs went where they wanted it to. Wouldn't the 1-coin-to-1-person connection be vulnerable to manipulation, since you wouldn't want someone (perhaps on the inside) to be able to generate coins and spam-vote?

> That actually seems like an interesting idea, but I'd like for the public to be able to view the list of unique coins for each candidate and verify theirs went where they wanted it to

This now means that if you can be forced to give up (or someone knows through other means) your coins "id" then they can see how you voted. This is something there are quite a few laws in place to try and stop with the current voting system, and it's considered to be a very important property.

At the end, those are three features we want from a voting system: that it's anonymous, verifiable, and that one can not prove what he voted for. Well, they are conflicting features, and we just can't have all three.

Paper ballots guarantee none, but people accept it because hacking it is thought to be expensive. That cypto-currency vote, if I got the idea correctly, is verifiable, but fails on anonymity and lack of proof. It may be possible to fix anonymity by some coin-mixing algorithm, but I'm not sure the lack of proof is even possible in practice (for any algorithm).

But anyway, remember that paper ballots guarantee none...

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