What is your proof that he’s a liar? He now has a Twitter handle @BlockchainVictim with 2 million followers. The number of alleged miscounts has now tripled.
Do you have any other response than “you must all be lying because my blockchain is unhackable?”
Again, your scenario requires that thousands of people deliberately vote for opposing candidate in order to lie later to discredit the voting system. I find that unlikely.
“Unhackable” isn’t a claim-it is an invitation for an uncountable number of hackers to prove you wrong…and past history tells us they will win.
And I have the same problem with mail in ballots. Your system just makes it worse, in that, instead of saying “Oh, I already mailed that in.” Or marking your ballot one way, and not mailing it in and instead showing up to vote in person. Some states let you invalidate a mail in vote by showing up in person, some don’t, check local rules for details.
Your idea takes everything insecure about mail in ballots, and makes it worse.
This instead created a permanent record of your vote. One that can be checked on at any time. One that you may be asked to provide at any time.
Oh, another downside of your system compared to mail in ballots. Mail in ballots have the convenience of being mailed in, which means you don’t have to visit the polling place. Your system requires that everyone go somewhere to pick up their token.
So, the public key is unique to you, right? You are the only person with that public key. So, when someone wants to see how you voted, you would use that unique key to show them how you voted.
You yourself said that there would be a way for someone to prove that they voted in a particular fashion. You keep weaseling around, trying to also claim that you could not prove that you voted in a particular fashion
Or, there is one website portal that people used to vote with, and that website corrupted the votes of all these people.
So you’re saying all of these people are lying? It’s sad how nobody trusts anybody anymore. OK, I’ll stop being coy and talk about what actually happened:
[ul]
[li]Swing voter forgot how they voted[/li][li]Voter hits the wrong button and doesn’t catch it.[/li][li]“Honey where’s my goddamn election key?” “In the kitchen junk drawer with mine and Honey Jr’s.”[/li][li]Elderly voter simply forgets how they voted[/li][li]Okay, I admit, there were a few liars and attention-seekers. Being on TV is fun.[/li][/ul]
21,000 isn’t actually that many votes. How many hanging chads were there in Florida?
The points being:
[ul]
[li]Because your system is anonymous, you have no way to disprove receipt fraud.[/li][li]Receipts provide new info that we never had before… how often people actually screw up when they cast their ballots. And people are loth to admit that they made a mistake.[/li][li]Whatever actually happened, you can’t prove it. It’s OkraSystems word against the American people, and let’s face it, these past few years haven’t been great for public confidence in big shiny computer systems.[/li][/ul]
So, given these technical shortcomings and human nature weaknesses… your system would be no improvement over paper, for much greater expense, more vulnerable points of intrusion, and worse overall public faith in the system.
Except everyone has their public key and it is, in fact, public - that is, it is in the voting ledger together with the vote. There is nothing tying any public key to any particular person. So if you show someone a public key, that someone has no way of knowing that this is your public key and not someone else’s - unless you can prove it with the private key. That you may have discarded after you voted.
Just because you don’t understand how it works doesn’t mean I am weaseling in any way.
See post #138.
That’s what I said the first time, and you corrected me as if I said something incorrect.
If you have the private key, then you can prove how you voted. If you do not have the private key, then you cannot verify that your vote was tabulated correctly.
You want it both ways, but you can’t have it both ways.
Nah, I am pretty sure that I have a pretty good idea of the system that you are trying to create here. I understand it just fine, and am pointing out flaws in it that you don’t seem to either understand or wish to acknowledge.
One last time, no weaseling on your part this time.
Under your proposed system, do I have a way to verify how I voted and that it was tabulated correctly, or do I not have a way to verify how I voted and that it was tabulated correctly?
Wrong again. You can verify that your vote was tabulated correctly without your private key - all you have to do is search in the transactions ledger for your public key and see what is recorded under it.
Yes you have a way to do it. You just look for your public key in the ledger and look at the transaction associated with it.
This company’s electronic voting system claims use in binding elections in Israel, Spain, and Norway.
Post #138 does not address any part of the scenario I presented to you. I accept your concession.
Okay, so not anonymous at all then.
Bad system.
That’s not the case. Public refers to who can possess the key, not the identity of the key’s owner. Under the proposed scheme you pick a keypair out of a bucket, and you take one home. Only the private key can identify the public key, you’re the only one who holds the private key, and nobody knows you’re the owner of the private key.
Which also means that voters have no way to challenge a vote that they believe was wrongly cast, whether it’s their own error, or machine tampering. Blockchain has absolutely no way to validate any tampering that happens outside its endpoints. None.
I mean anonymous from the stand point of being able to prove your vote.
Right, but he was saying that you can look up your vote by public key. Which means that you are able to show off your vote by using the public key that you have and know.
You may only be able to prove that it is your public key by possession of the private, but all that means is that you hold onto the private key until you have proved to your boss/spouse/friend/bully/payee what your public key is.
I assume that you actually carry a copy of the public key out with you as well, unless you are supposed to generate the public from the private on your own, which means you have a laminated official voting card with your public key on it that you can show off, and most people would believe is yours.
@Okrahoma
Are you against the use of the (verifiable, auditable) anonymizing mix-net?
Picking a secret key out of a bin, which requires you to come to a polling place and therefore completely defeats the Internet-voting aspect, may not directly identify you, but it is not secret, since you know the secret key and can later reveal it. Proper electronic voting systems leave you with a receipt that allows you to verify that your vote has been tallied correctly, but can not be used to prove to anyone how you actually voted.
What you have is one-way traceability. I have the private key, so only I can trace the public key back to me. So strictly speaking it is private like a bank transaction, but not symmetrically anonymous like a truck-stop gloryhole in the next town over.
Really to me, the key infrastructure is not the big issue here, we can assume it’s more or less a solved problem as people already reliably depend on it to move enormous amounts of drug funds through darknet markets. When these networks are compromised, it’s always at or outside the endpoint. Okrahoma’s scheme does nothing to address that because it ignores everything outside the blockchain endpoints, which is where most of the mischief happens.
I mean, ultimately someone can attach a hidden camera to your body and force you to document the entire voting process if they’re dead set on ensuring you vote a certain way. And right now mail-in ballots have the glaring problem of only needing a signature before they can be sold for $50 to whoever wants them. Not that I think this is a huge issue with paper ballots, but strong-arming someone out of their public key when they don’t want to tell you isn’t a huge strike against this proposed system.
I think the fact that the private key, once distributed, can be sold (or worse, stolen), without so much as an ink signature to protect it once it leave it’s owners hands is a much bigger issue simply due to scale. It’d be a lot easier to collect thousands of keys en masse from the apathetic and easily persuaded than it is to go around and convince everyone to record themselves voting a certain way.
Only you, and those you share that key with. That’s my problem, that you can prove to others how you voted.
Secrecy of the ballot is my major preoccupation, so that’s what I am focused on here. I consider a ballot that is not secret to have little integrity.
There are enough flaws in this idea that we don’t really need to get that far anyway, because, as you said, there are many flaws before it even gets that far.
He still hasn’t answered the question of how long these public and private keys will be, either. I think a huge flaw is going to be people not wanting to have to enter 37 digit alphanumeric codes in order to vote, nor look up their public vote with a different 64 digit code.
Much longer than that. Hundreds of characters.