votes

VOTEism is a political opinion poll app originally made for the 2020 USA Presidential Election. We launched VOTEism on HN about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584648

We now believe VOTEism is needed in every country that has a democracy. Accordingly, VOTEism now supports opinion polling for Belarus. If you are a Belarusian you can download the VOTEism apps for your country from the links below and vote for your preferred Presidential Candidate.

iOS: https://ios.voteism.org Android: https://android.voteism.org About VOTEism: https://docs.voteism.org

We hope Belarus rises up safer and stronger from this.

Thanks for commenting. If you are concerned that our signature is over candidate name or ID, we don't do that. We sign the encrypted vote and not the plain text. We verify it on the air-gapped system.

Thanks for all the questions raised here. Really appreciate it. To answer your concerns/questions -

1. Registration part is open-source and we have taken precautions such that same user doesn't register twice from the same device using different SIMs, change of devices. 2. We have made sure that the registered device is a mobile number 3. Restriction and verification of the user registration to where the poll is being held. For example, currently VOTEism app cannot be downloaded outside of US. 4. Counting part is not open-source by design, because it is processed offline and it is a proprietary algorithm out of necessity for secrecy. 5. We want to make sure the counting of the votes happens offline to eliminate the scope for manipulation 6. Vote data is encrypted and validated with it's signature to make sure it is not tampered with. 7. We are also making sure that the keys are rotated periodically. 8. We can guarantee that the collected information statistics are accurate.

I hope we have answered your questions. Please feel free to raise your concerns. If you want to take the conversation further you can email us at [email protected]

When we process the data and aggregate the results on the air-gapped system we do make sure that the user vote is not counted twice. Like you pointed out this is one of the fundamental things that is super important and we were very careful when we designed the app to address this issue. We did make sure that a single individual's votes are not counted twice. It is a custom algorithm. Also, we have taken precautions during registration too.

When we process the results on the air-gapped system our algorithm does make sure that the user's vote is counted only once (no matter how many times the user has voted). Please read the process at https://voteism.org

Thanks for sharing the info. Will take a look.

The encrypted data along with the signature of the encrypted vote is written to the bigquery table (and not directly to the air-gapped server) which is written to another temp folder (only the account that has access permissions can write to this folder) before being downloaded and processed on air-gapped server. The malicious server will not be directly able to write to the air-gapped server.

Thanks for pointing the issue with the thread pool and will take a look.

Hi Everyone,

We are redoing the Show HN for VOTEism.

The first time we did a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430800), there was a very valid suggestion from the HN Community that we open source the code. Accordingly we have published the code here: https://github.com/VOTEism.

A brief about VOTEism ... again :)

The Covid-19 situation forced many things to shift online. We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future.

VOTEism is a secure political opinion poll app to express your preference for one electoral candidate or the other. VOTEism currently works for the 2020 USA Presidential Election only. But we hope to take it to all countries where democratic elections happen.

Current political opinion polls are riddled with low sample sizes, interviewer biases, push poll tactics, self voting sock-puppets, and worst of all, the lack of privacy. VOTEism seeks to change that.

Your vote is encrypted with a public key on your mobile device and is decrypted with the private key on an air-gapped system. 4096 bit keys are used. Anonymized and aggregated results are published on the VOTEism mobile apps.

VOTEism is built, published and funded by a small and independent software company (AskDesis INC.) based in the United States. We have no political, governmental, corporate, or media affiliation. Please take time to read our transparency policy here: https://docs.voteism.org/transparency

We hope you find VOTEism useful. Feel free to ask us anything.

Links: iOS: https://ios.voteism.org Android: https://android.voteism.org Docs: https://docs.voteism.org Source Code: https://github.com/VOTEism

We are in the process of publishing the code on Github.Allow us a few weeks.

Hi Everyone,

The Covid-19 situation forced many things to shift online. We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future.

VOTEism is a secure political opinion poll app to express your preference for one electoral candidate or the other. VOTEism currently works for the 2020 USA Presidential Election only.

Current political opinion polls are riddled with low sample sizes, interviewer biases, push poll tactics, self voting sock-puppets, and worst of all, the lack of privacy. VOTEism seeks to change that.

Your vote is encrypted with a public key and is decrypted with the private key on an air-gapped system. Anonymized and aggregated results are published on the VOTEism mobile apps.

VOTEism is built, published and funded by a small and independent software company (AskDesis INC.) based in the United States. We have no political, governmental, corporate, or media affiliation. Please take time to read our transparency policy here: https://docs.voteism.org/transparency

We hope you find VOTEism useful.

HN seems to be the last resort to get Google to help :/

AMP makes work easier for Google (their indexing and content presentation process). However it's presented as something that makes it easier for us the general public.