For a 2016 article about online voting, i'm really surprised to find no mention of block-chain related solutions...
It seems most of the concern addressed here can be solve with this kind of "open-computing / open-data" technologies.
If you are interested in this topic, I strongly advise you the reading of: https://medium.com/@DomSchiener/publicvotes-ethereum-based-v...
And more generally what can be done with contract on the ethereum block-chain.
This is the answer. You should never trust any one given voting machine. But it is much, much harder to corrupt large consensus networks, and blockchain based voting lets you maintain pseudonymity and it lets you verify the results with whatever computer you want.
Some neat features you can bake into a blockchain based voting protocol:
* You can have temporary identifiers in the confirmation stage. IE, you cast your vote, you can use other computers for the first couple minutes to verify that vote, but after that your vote is added to blocks as a signature rather than direct identifier tied to the block, meaning once committed neither you nor anyone else has a concrete correlation between you and your vote.
* Alternatively, you can have a dual ledger of voter and vote, where the two are not correlated, but you can identify who has or has not voted but not what they have voted for. This gives you less verification integrity but guarantees anonymity to prevent voter coercion.
* You can have kill switches built in, generated hash keys at vote time that will cancel a vote out unique to the vote, either in the confirmation phase or even when committed (basically the same as adding something to a balance and then removing it again).
* You can use one single protocol implementation for all public record voting, and then have membership restricted groups that define constituencies through sidechains. That way you can leverage an international network of computers to secure all votes you want secured, rather than have easily 51% attacked small chains for each vote or constituency. It would be distinct from trustless models in that you would need some kind of parent organization to arrange membership in voting groups and to establish vote blocks.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, blockchains/consensus algorithms won't work. If the computer/phone that the software is running on is compromised and the attackers have control of the video and/or input devices, there are many ways of misdirecting the voter to make the wrong selection - in that case the whole stack of protocols and algorithms work just as they were intended, but it doesn't matter because the selection of the candidate was decided by the virus, no the voter.
And it doesn't take much to swing an election - you don't need to compromise many machines. So you end up needing 100% security on almost 100% of the voters' devices. That's simply not possible.
People have a hard time believing that we can't fix the security problems with online voting. We can't fix them.
Your claims are too broad for the evidence you present.
A trivial solution would be when you vote online you get texted/emailed confirmation. If you don't respond to the confirmation you get a call. The confirmation gives you a candidate you voted for and a blockchain signature and an opportunity to report error.
In the event you report error you could always show up at your local voting booth and get a paper copy.
Please explain to my mother how this system would work.
And should this system fail, or simply be faked, how would I know?
PublicVotes' first claim is to be "fair". Fairness is a property of the form of election (eg approval voting vs first-past-the-post), not the voting system. I'll scan the docs, see if there's any merit, but right out of the gate the starting assumptions are way off base, so don't have much hope for the rest.
> Please explain to my mother how this system would work.
Instead of casting your vote by giving it to a single person you give it to many different groups interested in keeping the election fair. These groups can be anyone -- advocacy groups, political parties, independent auditors, or local governments. They all receive your vote, verify that it's correct, and sign their name below your vote on a public ledger which can't be tampered with without everyone knowing.
Hell, you don't even really need a digital blockchain for this kind of system to work.
I mean the best way to explain it is to say "I put my vote on several pieces of paper, and give it to several people. One person could edit it, but that would conflict with everyone else. Everyone can see who I gave my anon vote to, and can verify that it all matches up." It's abstracted by a lot, but blockchain is basically just a public ledger.
The article indirectly addresses that in the last paragraph: paper is something everyone understands.
I'm all for improving processes with technology but I'll have to admit that even though I've been neck deep in Software development for 2 decades, the block-chain solutions require a fair amount of mental work for me. They may be good but I don't readily understand them. And I can guarantee you that my parents don't.
This brings up the problem of having a solution that only a few experts know how it works. It's a hard sell on the rest of the population to have them trust these "certified voting technology experts" that would have to be in place.
Indeed, that's seems like a big weak point: you need to understanding the technology to trust it!
First, I think that's a great news, if the limitation is only human and not logical, because humain can changes (a bit).
Let's look at the digital world currently: Peoples, companies and state, use internet to store and transfer private and valuable informations. All the world financial assets are process on the network, almost everyone use ATM, and store personal picture online etc.
All of this with just a very few percent of the population (people like me and you) knowing "more or less" how this really works!
A main adoption of online voting on the block chain will required efforts for everybody with the knowledge to democratize it, but in fact you don't need to understand all of it to trust it (like when you withdrawing money from an ATM).
We could say right now that everyone owning bitcoin "trust" the block-chain, and I would be surprise if more than 50% of them have read and understand Satoshi's whitepaper and the fundamental basics of the network.
Also at the end, even if it's intellectually new, it's not that difficult to understand even for our beloved parents :)
While that's a decent premise and I agree that less than 5% of the US population understands blockchains, I would also reckon they don't understand HTTP (or HTTPS) protocols, B-trees, networks, cryptographic hashes, or even the compilers that underpin much of technology. But they're more than willing to trust these things with the entirety of their liquid assets if it spares them a 20 minute trip to the bank.
I think there would still be a group of people who don't trust blockchains (or, let's be real, technology whatsoever - like the interviewee). And they're the people that drive to booths and do their business on paper. And I'm okay with that.
However, with all of those. If there is a problem: either the consequences are not significant. Or there is a paperwork around to a problem, which includes laws and judges.
With online voting, we are deciding the judges that get to say - "everything is totally perfect with the way I got elected."
Honestly, given the fact that a significant number of people already think their vote "doesn't count" (given on average ~40% of people don't even bother) I doubt they would be more concerned with vote tampering than with potential identity/bank theft.
Electronic voting machines are used in many places in the US. I can guarantee you most people couldn't give you any details on how they work. Yet they still accepted them relatively quickly.
From your second link: "True, if you consider vote buying a type of electoral fraud, the scheme is not fraud-proof."
And of course, "vote buying" can be substituted by "coerced voting". Any system where someone can physically see the voter casting their vote is flawed, regardless of whatever tricks you then use to obscure it once it's in the system.
It is a matter of degree. Anyone can carry a cell phone into a voting booth to photograph their ballot. And we already have voting by mail in many jurisdictions.
In the state of Oregon votes are handled 100% vote-by-mail. I've never heard any complaints from them about voter coercion or other issues caused by not physically stepping into a voting booth.
If there are any issues caused by this in Oregon, or other locales that use vote-by-mail, how come these articles never bring them up? I can only surmise that vote-by-mail seems to work pretty well so far, so what's the rationale for being against it?
about anonymity: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.0