Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by heliumcraft 3501 days ago
The voting would using a cryptographic system to ensure confidentiality.

The coercion attack is an interesting problem but something that is already illegal but cannot be fully prevented. IMO it outweights the disadvantages of a centralized voting database that can be easily changed by a sys admin.
1 comments
acdha 3501 days ago
How would that magic crypto work? Remember, it needs to stop both willful vote selling and coerced checking.

Your second paragraph ignores the fact that the current system of anonymous ballots prevents the problem quite well, as evidenced by fraud rates measured in single-digit-per-billion levels, and paper ballots allow recounts without any use of computers and have the nice effect of making tapering a physically-diverse hard problem requiring a conspiracy involving far more people.

link
heliumcraft 3501 days ago
See zk-snarks, zcash, homomorphic encryption, etc..

Let's not make this an accidental strawman.. My second paragraph is referring to electronic and internet voting solutions vs decentralized/blockchain solutions and NOT traditional in person voting with independent observers, etc..

link
acdha 3501 days ago
> See zk-snarks, zcash, homomorphic encryption, etc..

Can you specify precisely how those work to prevent this problem? Remember, this is harder than trying to prevent a third-party from identifying users because the system has to survive collusion by the user.

link
heliumcraft 3501 days ago
As in vote selling and coerced checking? probably can't, but then again, neither can centralized internet voting solutions. Even in normal voting, you can take a photo of the ballot to then prove who you voted for and get paid for it (and/or not get beaten).

Again this is not about perfect pie in the sky solution to all problems, just better digital voting solutions. As I said in the original comment, I don't think it will solve problems that have always been with us, but "It would certainly be nice to vote online yet anonymously, confident that I can see in a public secure ledger that my voted was counted as a intended and that no cheating or voting manipulation (==> ON THE LEDGER LEVEL <==) took place."

link
acdha 3501 days ago
> As in vote selling and coerced checking? probably can't, but then again, neither can centralized internet voting solutions.

This is one of the reasons why we don't have internet voting: it's inferior to the status quo in critical areas. “blockchain” is not magic pixie dust which fixes that problem and the people backing it don't seem to have studied the problem very deeply, as evidenced by your repeated assertions that “the voting would using a cryptographic system to ensure confidentiality” before finally admitting that nobody has proposed a system resistant to a key class of attacks.

> Even in normal voting, you can take a photo of the ballot to then prove who you voted for and get paid for it (and/or not get beaten).

The difference is that it's harder to do that – or even illegal, see http://bigstory.ap.org/article/709338e5557a49e7ad5c68109ffec... – and it's not foolproof since you could take a picture of a ballot but void it and cast a different one, both of which make widespread coercion or selling unreliable.

> As I said in the original comment, I don't think it will solve problems that have always been with us

Simply asserting that it's always been with us doesn't change the fact that this is a problem which the current status quo was actively designed to prevent and that the proposed system makes that problem far worse.

link
heliumcraft 3501 days ago
The whole discussion was NOT about the status quo traditional voting vs blockchain, It was about Internet voting in regards to centralized solutions vs decentralized/blockchain solutions. They both share SOME similar problems, but the blockchain is a improvement in many regards albeit not a perfect one. There is still a lot of open problems in regards to this. For the moment though, in person voting it's still better.

The day might come though that internet voting will be widespread. When that day comes I rather have a decentralized solution solution than a centralized one that can be easily manipulated.

link