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Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @12:47PM (#13177963)
But how do you verify that each voter is authorized to vote, and that only one vote was cast? It seems if you involve a digital system you're kicking the trust bucket down the road.

The security of a digital systems is "good enough" IMO, especially if there's a public cryptographically verifiable ledger. We bank online where the banks essentially only hold cash in the form of a database entry. The benefits of digital voting means we can have more granular input in our government's operations. I don't see paper ever scaling to meet that demand.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by nabla9 on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @12:55PM (#13178058)
Yes, IMO.

Remember that your IMO is not what the consensus among security experts is. There are many things that you and me missed.

The worst problem with electronic internet voting is that depending on country, something like 5-40 percent of voters loses the secret ballot and the opportunity to vote independently without coercion. Husband, brother or other family member will be behind their back to watch how they vote.

Here in Finland I have a friend who has been election official and he says that it's not uncommon common for family member trying to squeeze into ballot box or try get behind. Especially if the ballot has been cast in post office with small space.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smw on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:51PM (#13179089)
This is a big deal.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by specialist on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:07PM (#13178743)
I disagree. I'll be surprised if any electronic voting system matches the integrity, performance, scalability, feature set of the Australian Ballot, of paper ballots cast at polls sites counted when the polls close.

Your jurisdiction's voter registration database is (hopefully) up to date. YMMV. Note that verified reports of registration fraud are very, very few. Whereas caging, purging are fairly common.

Briefly, On election day: voter shows up to correct poll site, shows some kind of ID (YMMV), name found in that location's poll book, voter signs in, ballot is issued, voter marks ballot, voter casts ballot. If there's any error (question) during this process, voter is issued a provisional ballot, to be adjudicated out of band.

Ballots are counted before the polls open and again when the polls close. The bookkeeping is simple and easily verified.

Everything is bundled in tamper evident seals, observed and signed by members of opposing parties, physically escorted by opposing members, etc.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:25PM (#13178890)
> Everything is bundled in tamper evident seals, observed and signed by members of opposing parties, physically escorted by opposing members, etc.

I don't see why this level of security couldn't be used to randomly and deterministically assign crypto keys that are used for some kind of blockchain voting scheme. Put a thousand pre-known keys in a hat, one thousand people draw keys from a hat, the key is activated on the blockchain and points to a user-defined voting wallet. Now you have anonymous cryptographically verifiable voting with double spend protection. Am I missing something?

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by specialist on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:24PM (#13179790)
Voting, blockchain, something something, tada.

Voting wallets? Assign crypto keys? You mean just like issuing a ballot? How would someone do a recount? An end-to-end audit? Keep track of who was assigned which key (thereby destroying the secret ballot)? Who voted and who didn't? How do you handle provisional ballots? Etc.

PM me once your proposal satisfies the requirements (works as a replacement) for current election administration systems.

Okay, maybe I'm being too dismissive, which I normally hate. But blockchains, crypto, signatures are not magical. Design the whole system, make it auditable while accounting for information leakage, simulate a few real world elections. Do the leg work, unlike Chaum, Rivet, others. THEN we can talk.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by wittrock on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:43PM (#13179939)
Chaum, Rivest, others have done the leg work though, in real-world binding elections:

"Scantegrity II Municipal Election at Takoma Park: The First E2E Binding Governmental Election with Ballot Privacy"

http://static.usenix.org/event/sec10/tech/full_papers/Carbac...

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by specialist on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @06:56PM (#13180948)
Thank you. Sort of. Now I have to waste my time figuring out how Scantegrity is flawed.

With the prior Punchscan system, voter privacy is accomplished thru hash collisions. Hiding your ballot in a herd of ballots cast. A trick that works only if your herd (precinct) is large enough and your ballots are simple enough. Definitely would not work (protect voter privacy) in my jurisdiction.

Side note about IRV, as used in Maryland Park: It's now a non-starter. After the handful of well-studied experiments, election administrators are dead set against it. Ballots are complicated, voter education is tough, and IRV necessitates electronic tabulation, which rules out legally required manual recounts. (My jurisdiction often gets over 500k ballots. IRV is not feasible here.)

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by vacri on Thursday December 15, 2016 @07:13AM (#13184042)
Any time your voting system for the general public involves "fiddle with this computer/software", you've lost. The public in general can't handle security methods, and many folks just shut their brains down when it comes to computers. Similarly, if you can't explain the method in terms they can understand, then their trust in the system will simply not be there.

People lose wads of cash that are valuable to them; they're going to care even less about their electronic verification file.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by dispose13432 on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:32PM (#13179394)
So you still have to come in to collect your ballot.

Might as well just vote then and there

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:44PM (#13179497)
This is only a process for registering an anonymous voting wallet. It could subsequently be used to vote for any ballot.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by jeena on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:57PM (#13179582)
If I install a virus on your grandfathers computer and show him that his vote has been counted when it fact it wasn't, he will not be able to check that.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:08PM (#13179681)
He could just verify from another computer since the blockchain is public. Bitcoin wallets already have m of n signature schemes that can require multiple devices to sign before being valid transactions.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by sobani on Thursday December 15, 2016 @10:32AM (#13185215)
Awesome, this means I can check my family members voted the way I 'suggested' them to.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by RangerScience on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:40PM (#13179003)
I don't know, but I'm commenting to bookmark your comment.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by lazaroclapp on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @06:43PM (#13180865)
Some of the places with the highest levels of distrust on electoral authorities and government bureaucracy solve this problem by marking your thumb with indelible ink, which can't be washed off but fades away over the course of a week or so. This guarantees people enter polling stations only once, even if they magically happen to have been registered at multiple places.

We use this in Mexico, in addition to (non-digital) fingerprint-carrying voter ids. Historically, it has not prevented fraud in general (most of which happened due to insufficient audit procedures and rural polls not having observers from all parties, allowing for stuffed ballots and the like). It did however close that particular attack vector. My trust on the results of an individual polling station in an urban area with observers from all major and most minor parties is actually quite high, even as I know any or all of the observers involved are likely to be corrupt and have low regard for the law. The reason for this is that they are all incentivized to prevent each other from cheating and have the means to detect tampering in such setting (without needing uncommon expertise beyond observation and basic arithmetic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by geofft on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:02PM (#13179630)
> public cryptographically verifiable ledger

This is a thing you actively don't want. You don't want to be able to prove to anyone else how you voted. Otherwise it would be absolutely trivial for your boss to say, "So, you voted for that anti-union candidate, right?" (Or your boss to not say that, but just happen to give promotions to people who show proof of voting the way the boss wants.)

The right to a secret ballot is demanded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yes, this renders the electronic voting problem - and honestly the voting problem in general - very close to impossible. That's why it's hard.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:21PM (#13179771)
>> Put a thousand pre-known keys in a hat, one thousand people draw keys from a hat, the key is activated on the blockchain and points to a user-defined voting wallet. Now you have anonymous cryptographically verifiable voting with double spend protection

I just invented a scheme to anonymize votes in 5 minutes. I'm sure if smarter people tried we could definitively solve this. I'm not convinced this is hard as much as people are saying it's hard.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by geofft on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @07:24PM (#13181118)
1. As others said, the private key proves how you voted. If you can verify it with the private key, you can show the proof to someone else. And if it's a single-use private key, there's no reason for me not to share the private key once I voted.

You need to have deniability; I need to be able to revoke my ability to prove how I voted, and moreover I need to be required to revoke it (otherwise I can be compelled not to revoke it). Right now, I am unable to leave the voting booth with any receipt of how I voted, even if I wanted to (i.e, even if someone else wanted me to). I can see my vote, and election monitors prevent anyone else from seeing it until it leaves my hands. In most places in the US, I can't even take a cell phone photo of my votes, and that's a good thing because nobody can ask me to take a cell phone photo of my votes.

2. If they're pre-known, anonymous, single-use keys, nothing prevents a corrupt election official from keeping a copy of the key and voting before the voter gets home. The voter has no way to prove that they didn't vote and that someone stole their key.

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by patmorgan235 on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @09:23PM (#13181834)
a solution to 1 would be ring signatures as used by many crypto note base currency. They group unrelated input and outputs to give all the parties involved plausible deniability to who paid what to who. So your vote would be mixed with a group of others so no one can tell exactly who vote for just that the right number of votes were cast.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by tangent128 on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:39PM (#13179899)
To prevent coercion, it's not sufficient to allow anonymity; you have to disallow means by which a person can prove how they voted.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @08:03PM (#13181388)
How true is this? Somebody could just take a picture of their ballot (under the threat of violence presumably). Sure they're not supposed to, but at this point we're relying on legislation - where the legislation could say employers aren't allowed to ask for employees voting wallets. Maybe I'm missing something.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by vertex-four on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @08:32PM (#13181564)
If you mess up your ballot sheet, you can ask for a replacement - at least in the UK. Your original ballot sheet gets recorded specially as having been replaced, and you get a new one which gets counted. The result is that you can discreetly take a photo of your ballot sheet and then go ask for a new one if you're being threatened.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by geofft on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @08:55PM (#13181692)
The penalty for taking a picture of your ballot is on you, not the person asking for the picture, and it's at the time the record is created, not when someone asks for it. So, it's perfectly plausible and defensible for me to say "There was a poll monitor, I couldn't take a ballot selfie, sorry." That is much simpler than saying "Hey, 911, my boss just asked me for my ballot proof."

(The other thing is that photos of ballots have only become a serious threat in the last few years, and at the moment there's not really voter coercion through those photos, as far as we know. If it becomes a problem, I expect a bigger crackdown on it.)

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by vertex-four on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:34PM (#13179860)
So how does this stand up to "show me the private key you used"?
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by specialist on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @06:57PM (#13180963)
I just invented a scheme to anonymize votes in 5 minutes.

Tada!

Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by smokeyj on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @07:41PM (#13181240)
Having a bad day? Just need a little attention? I'll talk to you, specialist :)
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by caspianm on Thursday December 15, 2016 @04:04AM (#13183363)
What about postal voting? Probably less of a threat because it's not that common I guess. But does it mean there are no countries complying with secret ballot demands?
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by erispoe on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:19PM (#13178263)
We can tolerate errors in banking that we cannot in voting. Banking can be good enough, voting must be trusted to the most absolute degree.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by shortstuffsushi on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @07:05PM (#13181002)
In the US, at least, we tolerate a fair amount of error. See the WI recount this election, which exposed the totals to be off by over one hundred votes. I'd be willing to bet if you recount again, it'd be off from that total as well. It isn't absolute is my point.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by aaron_m04 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @01:29AM (#13182862)
The electoral college introduces quite a lot of error, but people don't seem to care enough to change it.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by specialist on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:10PM (#13178758)
Further, our first past the post election voting system is especially brittle AND the window for detecting and correcting errors is very small.
Re:CHVote: Open-source e-voting system from Switzerland by lambertsimnel on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:10PM (#13179692)
If the United States were to adopt one practice from the Swiss government, proportional representation might do the most good.