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Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by dgudkov on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:21PM (#14921571)
We can trust digital money, but we can't trust digital votes?
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by mixmax on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:25PM (#14921628)
correct.

The problem with digital voting is that it needs to be anonymous who votes for what. That makes the problem much much harder.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by rakoo on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:48PM (#14921893)
To be more precise, there are 3 things that must be met for a vote to be considered acceptable, digital or not:

* it must be anonymous, ie nobody but you should know you you voted for

* it must keep integrity, ie nobody can change your vote

* it must be verifiable by all participants

Paper vote makes it easy to meet all criterions: just keep an eye on the ballot and you will be relatively sure that everything is fine. On the other hand it is impossible to have all those conditions with a digital vote, if only because digital anything isn't easily verifiable by all participants.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by JumpCrisscross on Thursday August 03, 2017 @02:00PM (#14922018)
> criterions

One criterion, three criteria.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by unvote on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:52PM (#14921939)
Implementing anonymous, distributed, publically auditable voting is quite simple. Implementing it in such a way that you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, but not be able to present it to a coercive third party to as a receipt to verify you voted for their preferred candidate, is hard.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by bobcallme on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:30PM (#14921674)
Can you trust that you won't be punished for voting the "wrong" way? Or maybe you won't get that raise that you were seeking out because you belong to the wrong party. Paper ballots keep things anonymous and make it difficult to track who voted for whom. With "digital money" it does not mater as much if people can see who exchanged monies.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by amenghra on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:34PM (#14921712)
There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

Same goes with money, these things called crypto currencies are digital money offering various levels of anonymity.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by pedrocr on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:44PM (#14921845)
>There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

None that don't require printing a paper ballot so the voter can check the correct thing was done. And then taking that paper ballot and putting it in a sealed box. And once you've done that the high-tech bits are irrelevant and you're back to the cheap, safe and easy to use voting system we've been using without issue for decades or even centuries.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by amenghra on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:53PM (#14921952)
You can totally have a blind signature based scheme that doesn't have some of the flaws which are present with paper ballots. Some of the requirements aren't met today (such as having one and only one digital identity for everyone) but it doesn't mean that paper ballots are the only solution.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by pedrocr on Thursday August 03, 2017 @02:10PM (#14922124)
With enough effort you could implement something that still requires printing a receipt but doesn't require the ballot box. The identity issue isn't even a problem in most modern democracies. But that system would be less efficient and be easier to seed discredit since normal people don't understand it. That gives you a riot or two quite quickly. That's the other properly of paper and ballot box that technologues dismiss way too easily. >90% of the population would be able to run a paper election successfully and yet would be hopeless at understanding a complex crypto scheme. That means you quickly lose a key property of elections which is that whoever lost actually accepts that result. From the previous discussion:

"Electronic voting is the reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz tests if you know the absolute basics about technology to implement something extremely simple. Electronic voting tests if you are able to reject the use of technology when it doesn't add any advantage and instead creates very hard to solve failure modes. Voting benefits from the use of the extremely simple ballot and box. It benefits from it not being programmable and from the counting method being something that almost all the population is able to carry out let alone understand."

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by bobcallme on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:50PM (#14921909)
> There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

I have yet to see one that involves a digital voting system. Many of these voting systems are insecure and F/OSS(free and open source) won't fix that. You are giving too many people physical access to these systems at every step of the chain. Many have proposed a "blockchain" based voting scheme, but that takes out the anonymous aspect of voting.

> Same goes with money, these things called crypto currencies are digital money offering various levels of anonymity.

Yes and none of them provides any anonymity since they all at one point or another reveals too much about a given transaction.

With paper ballots, it's really difficult/infeasible to track who voted for whom and is a bit more tamper resistant on a large scale.

edit: a word.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by bitexploder on Thursday August 03, 2017 @02:54PM (#14922570)
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by bsder on Thursday August 03, 2017 @03:32PM (#14922981)
Who says we can trust digital money?

The "trust" of the digital money system is because we can have humans unwind any transactions we deem to be "incorrect".

Unfortunately, we can't "unwind" an electoral transaction without giving up anonymity.

Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by komali2 on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:25PM (#14921625)
Who's "we?" I don't trust digital money :P
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by amenghra on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:35PM (#14921724)
Does your bank account, credit card, etc. count as digital money? Your account balance is just bits somewhere.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by komali2 on Thursday August 03, 2017 @07:28PM (#14924973)
Well, ok, but my account balance is guaranteed by a government (for well above my balance). I don't get that with digital currency.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by scierama on Thursday August 03, 2017 @05:02PM (#14923862)
You're conflating records management with actual currency.
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by mrkrabo on Thursday August 03, 2017 @01:24PM (#14921607)
Who trusts digital money?
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by CaptSpify on Thursday August 03, 2017 @02:52PM (#14922556)
pretty much anyone that uses a bank
Re:To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software by scierama on Thursday August 03, 2017 @05:03PM (#14923866)
Digital records management is a technique; not digital currency.