So suddenly maintaining security on your voting rights, which most people do very infrequently, becomes as big a pain in the ass as maintaining security on your credit card, which most people use every day.
I know. It is much better to cast your vote like you do today, without any way to check whether it was actually registered, and registered correctly. Just cast and pray.
I have literally no concern that my vote is being mis-tallied in the way you suggest. Perhaps my government in Washington, DC is more competent than the government of where ever you live?
But, again, the problem here is that by “see in a public ledger” you mean “trust what some piece of software that may or may not be correct shows when you type in an inscrutable 30-character code”.
You can’t just wave away the fact that almost no one understands the underlying technology here. It’s the central problem with this plan.
Instead of trusting that election officials will correctly secure and count pieces of paper, we have to trust that various software developers will correctly and scrupulously implement algorithms.
History indicates that we’re pretty good at securing important pieces of paper, and fairly bad at implementing software correctly.
No. The ledger is public. I don’t think you understand what that means.
It is not one piece of software. It is literally any one of hundreds of pieces of software, independently written, running on hundreds of web sites, looking at ledgers that are stored, duplicated, in dozens of places. Just like it is today with bitcoin.
I know how a blockchain works.
And the blockchain is a big blob of binary data. It isn’t human-readable. In order to actually interact with it, you use some piece of software to parse and display it.
So, your average voter? Are they writing their own blockchain parser? Of course not. They’re using one someone else wrote. Is that piece of software reliable, secure, and bug free? Who knows.
Right, and just like with Bitcoin, while the central blockchain remains intact (modulo a few hard forks) the players around the periphery are ripe for exploitation. And they have been exploited aplenty.
What percentage of voters have to be using compromised software to make and verify their votes before that software maker can change the results of an election by voting incorrectly? In most elections… a pretty small percentage. Certainly single digits.
Despite suggestions to the contrary, what percentage of voters will actually vote with one piece of software, then verify their vote with an entirely independent piece of software. I’d guess that’s also in the single digits, leaving the vast majority of votes subject to the whims and ethics and competence of a handful of software developers.
It doesn’t matter if the blockchain is in theory verifiable by anyone. In practice only a small group of people with specialized skills can interact with it, and many of them will fuck it up. Because the fundamental problem of using the blockchain for anything mass-user-interfacing is that it’s too complicated for most people to understand.
Let’s make voting more like Bitcoin, because Russian hackers are unfairly discriminated against in American elections.
This is like a proposal to give everyone in America an unbreakable padlock for their door. The lock itself cannot be broken, and we can prove it with math. The problem is that it does nothing for the windows, the hinges, the chimney, the door, the floorboards, the mail slot, and people opening their unbreakable lock for the nice man from the election office who just had to check a few things.
It solves absolutely nothing, and makes the security problem worse by ignoring that all the unbreakable crytography in the world can’t protect against a good old fashioned social engineering scam.
It’s a ridiculous fix for a problem that doesn’t exist. It requires both that a person go down to the polling place to pick up a token, and then go home to vote. If you really really absolutely positively need to implement a blockchain audit trail, make everyone vote in person, and have the private key on a little tear-off reciept on their ballot. If they want to take that string of numbers home and enter it on the website and verify that ballot A4TPQ40AMX1P5TG23JF8SHF was correctly recorded as voting for Steve Rogers instead of Lex Luthor, then fine. Except 97% of the people aren’t going to do this. So how much trust does this add to the system?
The proposed problem is that people don’t trust the election officials. The proposed solution is a system where voters can cryptographically verify their own votes. The problem with the solution is that it will do the opposite. People aren’t going to trust the anarcho-capitalists who tell them that Bitcoin totally works, especially since they read in the papers every day about people who got scammed using Bitcoin. You and I know that people don’t get scammed using Bitcoin because the cryptography behind Bitcoin is flawed. The cryptography is fine, it’s a perfect unbreakable lock for your front door. That perfect unbreakable lock does nothing when the bad guys can just go around/through the door.
This would result in LESS confidence in the electoral process, not more. Only a few anarcho-capitalists and a couple of Russian hackers are going to want this system.
What proper authorities? The entire point of the blockchain are that there are no more “proper authorities”, the chain is the proper authority. If there are proper authorities, they can just be the ones running the election. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.
There are “proper authorities”. They are the ones that generate and distribute the tokens. As has been stated in this thread a dozen times. Did you miss that?
That runaround? Didn’t miss it at all.
Who are the proper authorities, and who appoints them?
Who decides how many there will be, and where/when they will be available?
If you have a proper authority that can invalidate tokens, then you don’t have a blockchain, you just have a central database that is distributed for no good reason. The entire point of the blockchain is that when you have a coin, the coin is yours, and only yours absolutely.
You can have a blockchain where one person hands out the coins but you can’t have a blockchain where one person gets to unilaterally decide to revoke them.
Do all interested parties have to be present again to observe when the old “lost” keys are invalidated and the new ones added to the block chain?
Why do you trust the proper authorities to generate and distribute the tokens?
Again, in a system like Bitcoin the “authorities” are 50% of all blockchain instances. If your copy of the blockchain that says you have ONE MILLION BITCOINS doesn’t agree with everyone else’s then you don’t actually own those Bitcoins. This of course breaks down if a cartel ever controls 51% of Bitcoin, but the problem there is that they can’t exploit their position without destroying Bitcoin, so stealing the other 49% doesn’t do any good because then the value of Bitcoin is zero.
If we’re trusting a distributed system run by Russian hackers to generate VoteCoins, then there are no proper authorities. But if the Russian hacker cartel controls 51% of the blockchain, then that becomes very valuable since they can decide the election. The fact that public trust in the election process is ruined isn’t a problem for them, because unlike for the Bitcoin cartel destroying public trust in democracy is the point. If the Bitcoin cartel destroys Bitcoin they destroy the value of their 51% control over Bitcoin which is bad for them. If the Votecoin cartel destroys Votecoin, then they’ve lost nothing.
I already answered that half a dozen times. Read the thread. There is a point at which you have to trust the government in the election process. The system I described minimizes that trust to the initial generation/distribution of tokens, and destruction of undistributed ones, closely supervised by all interested parties. As opposed to the current system, where trusting the government has to extend to everything in the process including numerous non-matching recounts.
The part of the govt that I trust with my ballot is the local board of elections, and specifically, my precinct judges.
I know the judges personally. They care waaaay too much abut election integrity. I vote for the people who appoint the people on my county’s election board. The fact that we didn’t have a central voting system is probably the biggest reason that russian attempts at directly hacking our elections were thwarted.
You are proposing getting rid off all of that, and replacing it with one single central authority. One that we should trust for, reasons?
Many flaws and problems have been pointed out in this scheme, which you have not addressed. You haven’t given any reason as to why this is better in any way. If we wanted to have the ability to prove how we voted, there are easier and less problematic ways of doing that.
If by “all interested parties” you mean “Russian hackers”, then good luck with that.
Bumped.
Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing: Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent