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A comment on What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much. Parent comment

Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by Canada on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:49PM (#21380864)
Well, I'm the head of this family and this family supports the republicrats, so I'm going to be looking at your phone honey, to make sure you don't make a mistake.

Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can see you all wisely agree with me.

The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.

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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by vearwhershuh on Monday October 28, 2019 @04:10PM (#21381087)
couldn't they issue you a secure private key when you vote?
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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by creato on Monday October 28, 2019 @04:30PM (#21381308)
If you can verify your own vote, you can be forced to divulge that information. There's no technical solution to this problem.
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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by aeternum on Monday October 28, 2019 @06:57PM (#21382657)
There is a simple solution: generate a random public key as part of the voting process and print it out for later verification but also include plenty of other people's public keys in the printout.

The voter can remember the position of their own key if they choose to for later validation against the open ledger and can use the others for deniability (if needed).

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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by Canada on Monday October 28, 2019 @05:03PM (#21381638)
That is not true. See work by Andrew Neff on verifiable shuffles of secrets. It is practical to produce a proof that can be verified by the voter but not useful in proving which way the ballot has been cast to anyone else.
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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by ac29 on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:20PM (#21382833)
I skimmed through the paper here (http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf) and it doesn't appear to solve the problem. Any time you can see your vote, so can anyone looking over your shoulder.

The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.

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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by Canada on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @08:02AM (#21396722)
Yeah it makes the use of electronic voting less vulnerable to tampering, but obviously the voting still needs to he done in a private booth.
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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by danbolt on Monday October 28, 2019 @05:23PM (#21381853)
I don't feel like I could create trust in democracy with something as complicated as a private key for a mostly non-technical nation such as Canada or France.
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Re:What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much by Canada on Monday October 28, 2019 @05:05PM (#21381664)
I can simply demand your private key in exchange for a reward or avoidance of punishment. "Hand me your phone and I will cast this vote"
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