It’s pseudonymous and is the best anonymous voting option we have. They aren’t actually tied to people’s personal information and you know this. A blockchain will therefore be perfectly fine.
If no electronic option is good enough for you, remember the tyrants of today and yesterday have already mastered rigging the paper ballot and they likely already do have your voting history tabulated in some archive somewhere. If you think blockchains are a security nightmare, then the ID system to tie voters to paper ballots will give you PTSD.
There is no reason to believe that paper ballots aren’t securable NOW and no reason to believe we will ever be able to secure electronic voting.
If you want to using cryptography print a challenge on the ballot have them type the number into 90s era flip phone sized device and have them write the response on the ballot. Without understanding anything about crypto they and the government both have half of a key and nobody can fool anyone.
Mathematically impossible to commit fraud based on math that has been given massive attention by a small army of very smart people.
If you can secure paper ballots, then blockchain voting by extension is much more secure.
Especially since blockchain encryption is not only extremely secure, but there is huge financial incentive to not break it, and that psychological barrier is ultimately the important one.
If you vote on your computer how exactly do you keep people’s computer from voting for them? How do you keep them from for instance changing the UI so that the graphic for candidate A actually registers a vote for B?
How do you provide a way for user bob to verify he voted for A without also implicitly providing an easy way for him to verify his vote to someone pressuring him to share how he voted either to reward him for voting how that party pleases or to punish him for voting “incorrectly”.
How do you provide a way to audit the vote without being able to see how people voted? If you do as you must have a database of ids to actual voters how do you keep that from leaking allowing everyone to see how everyone voted? Alternatively maybe it just leaks to whatever party is in control and THEY know how people voted so they can better target people for encouragement or suppression.
Not a single one of these issues is an issue with paper ballots but every one of these is a deal breaker for e-voting and some of them are mathematically unsolvable like it being impossible to have an auditable and secret electronic ballot.
Our current method of voting works and works well. We don’t NEED an answer a few days quicker at the expense of totally destroying actual security and secrecy. This is a dumb idea and we are all dumber for having spent time thinking about it.
If you vote with paper, how do you stop unscrupulous people from assuming your identity and voting in your stead? What’s to stop vote counters from disposing of your ballot because they claim you filled it out wrong, or didn’t fill in the circle all the way, or used the wrong color pen, or any of the other tricks they do?
Anyone can defraud absolutely anything anyone else does, so it’s pointless to use fear of fraud or abuse to not do a thing, especially voting where convenience and ease of use is a lot more important anyway.
Voting electronically is an inevitability given technological progress anyway, especially as we move out into space, so arguing about it isn’t going to do any good.
You hire competent people to hold the election, you pass laws declaring how the election is to be held, and if people deviate you sue them or hold them accountable. If the people conducting your election are themselves corrupt AND are secure against consequences technology doesn’t in any way save you but it can trivially damn you if its impossible for even competent people to conduct fairly as is trivially true.
You have not addressed a single point I have made. There is reason to believe electronic voting is impossible to secure with any presently forseeable level of technology while paper and pen are trivial to secure in ways that someone with a 6th grade education could have understood 100 years ago.
We vote every few years. In WA state you show your ID and register once or check a checkbox when you register for your license or ID and we give you an ID for $5 if you are poor. Thereafter your ballots come in the mail with a book about candidates positions in their own words. You have at that point weeks to fill it out and either walk a few blocks and drop it in a designated drop box or put it in a mailbox and let your mailman carry it.
Once the election is conducted we know the results in a few days. This is already incredibly easy, secure, and convenient. If there is any question ballots can be manually recounted by hand in a few more.
Your suggestion would be incredibly hard to implement, flawed, and give up either secrecy or security right off the bat. Further since it would rely on inscrutable computer code a single bad actor anywhere in the world could corrupt another-wise clean election with no legal means to go back and switch horses after the election had taken place and was adjudicated.
It is purely a nightmare of an idea implemented to cure the fiction of insecure paper ballots, to serve the specter of technology for technologies sake, and tickle the fancy of people who think they know what a smart person looks like.
Voting electronically is an inevitability given technological progress anyway, especially as we move out into space, so arguing about it isn’t going to do any good.
This is a complete fantasy. Changes in how elections are conducted don’t happen magically because the calendar flips over they are implemented by lawmakers who answer to constituents. Such lawmakers are generally old and are generally VERY conservative about technology and proponents of e-voting like yourself have no good answers to ANY of the inherent flaws of such a measure. Just because you think it will eventually be fit isn’t any reason to implement it now or ever.
Come back when you have an answer to ALL the flaws of e-voting. EG when you have mathematically verifiably secure clients that are verifiably secure even handed to morons which is universally available and usable by all and which can be understood to be secure by even said idiots. Then after that magic trick you can explain why spending Trillions was totally worth it compared to simply electronically tabulating paper ballots and hand counting to verify so we can spend 5 minutes in front of a screen instead of 5 minutes with a pen and know the answer a day sooner.
If you continue to have zero answers to any of the challenges please don’t bother to respond. To reiterate the most serious
No way to verify AND have voting be anonymous
Clients are impossible to secure see reflections on trusting trust for the ultimate question
Possible for a single bad actor to corrupt the process from the outside
Impossible to audit with 100% certainty because the mechanism to conduct election and verify it rely on the same technology
Even if 100% secure proving this to the average person is basically impossible as it is well beyond their understanding. This makes it easy to drum up support for election denial fantasies like Trump even in the absence of any evidence.
This destroys anonymity its a public ledger and how do you imagine that helps security. Your vote is only as secure as your shitty insecure computer.
It’s pseudonymous and is the best anonymous voting option we have. They aren’t actually tied to people’s personal information and you know this. A blockchain will therefore be perfectly fine.
If no electronic option is good enough for you, remember the tyrants of today and yesterday have already mastered rigging the paper ballot and they likely already do have your voting history tabulated in some archive somewhere. If you think blockchains are a security nightmare, then the ID system to tie voters to paper ballots will give you PTSD.
There is no reason to believe that paper ballots aren’t securable NOW and no reason to believe we will ever be able to secure electronic voting.
If you want to using cryptography print a challenge on the ballot have them type the number into 90s era flip phone sized device and have them write the response on the ballot. Without understanding anything about crypto they and the government both have half of a key and nobody can fool anyone.
Mathematically impossible to commit fraud based on math that has been given massive attention by a small army of very smart people.
If you can secure paper ballots, then blockchain voting by extension is much more secure.
Especially since blockchain encryption is not only extremely secure, but there is huge financial incentive to not break it, and that psychological barrier is ultimately the important one.
If you vote on your computer how exactly do you keep people’s computer from voting for them? How do you keep them from for instance changing the UI so that the graphic for candidate A actually registers a vote for B?
How do you provide a way for user bob to verify he voted for A without also implicitly providing an easy way for him to verify his vote to someone pressuring him to share how he voted either to reward him for voting how that party pleases or to punish him for voting “incorrectly”.
How do you provide a way to audit the vote without being able to see how people voted? If you do as you must have a database of ids to actual voters how do you keep that from leaking allowing everyone to see how everyone voted? Alternatively maybe it just leaks to whatever party is in control and THEY know how people voted so they can better target people for encouragement or suppression.
Not a single one of these issues is an issue with paper ballots but every one of these is a deal breaker for e-voting and some of them are mathematically unsolvable like it being impossible to have an auditable and secret electronic ballot.
Our current method of voting works and works well. We don’t NEED an answer a few days quicker at the expense of totally destroying actual security and secrecy. This is a dumb idea and we are all dumber for having spent time thinking about it.
If you vote with paper, how do you stop unscrupulous people from assuming your identity and voting in your stead? What’s to stop vote counters from disposing of your ballot because they claim you filled it out wrong, or didn’t fill in the circle all the way, or used the wrong color pen, or any of the other tricks they do?
Anyone can defraud absolutely anything anyone else does, so it’s pointless to use fear of fraud or abuse to not do a thing, especially voting where convenience and ease of use is a lot more important anyway.
Voting electronically is an inevitability given technological progress anyway, especially as we move out into space, so arguing about it isn’t going to do any good.
You hire competent people to hold the election, you pass laws declaring how the election is to be held, and if people deviate you sue them or hold them accountable. If the people conducting your election are themselves corrupt AND are secure against consequences technology doesn’t in any way save you but it can trivially damn you if its impossible for even competent people to conduct fairly as is trivially true.
You have not addressed a single point I have made. There is reason to believe electronic voting is impossible to secure with any presently forseeable level of technology while paper and pen are trivial to secure in ways that someone with a 6th grade education could have understood 100 years ago.
We vote every few years. In WA state you show your ID and register once or check a checkbox when you register for your license or ID and we give you an ID for $5 if you are poor. Thereafter your ballots come in the mail with a book about candidates positions in their own words. You have at that point weeks to fill it out and either walk a few blocks and drop it in a designated drop box or put it in a mailbox and let your mailman carry it.
Once the election is conducted we know the results in a few days. This is already incredibly easy, secure, and convenient. If there is any question ballots can be manually recounted by hand in a few more.
Your suggestion would be incredibly hard to implement, flawed, and give up either secrecy or security right off the bat. Further since it would rely on inscrutable computer code a single bad actor anywhere in the world could corrupt another-wise clean election with no legal means to go back and switch horses after the election had taken place and was adjudicated.
It is purely a nightmare of an idea implemented to cure the fiction of insecure paper ballots, to serve the specter of technology for technologies sake, and tickle the fancy of people who think they know what a smart person looks like.
This is a complete fantasy. Changes in how elections are conducted don’t happen magically because the calendar flips over they are implemented by lawmakers who answer to constituents. Such lawmakers are generally old and are generally VERY conservative about technology and proponents of e-voting like yourself have no good answers to ANY of the inherent flaws of such a measure. Just because you think it will eventually be fit isn’t any reason to implement it now or ever.
Come back when you have an answer to ALL the flaws of e-voting. EG when you have mathematically verifiably secure clients that are verifiably secure even handed to morons which is universally available and usable by all and which can be understood to be secure by even said idiots. Then after that magic trick you can explain why spending Trillions was totally worth it compared to simply electronically tabulating paper ballots and hand counting to verify so we can spend 5 minutes in front of a screen instead of 5 minutes with a pen and know the answer a day sooner.
If you continue to have zero answers to any of the challenges please don’t bother to respond. To reiterate the most serious
No way to verify AND have voting be anonymous
Clients are impossible to secure see reflections on trusting trust for the ultimate question
Possible for a single bad actor to corrupt the process from the outside
Impossible to audit with 100% certainty because the mechanism to conduct election and verify it rely on the same technology
Even if 100% secure proving this to the average person is basically impossible as it is well beyond their understanding. This makes it easy to drum up support for election denial fantasies like Trump even in the absence of any evidence.
Please address every single point.