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Hey everyone! Sorry I've been quiet for so long.
The June 7th primary in California is rapidly approaching and I've been involved in a project to create an international standard for secure electronic voting. The design work is all done and our first application of the technology is to use it to detect and uncover fraud, specifically voting machine tampering. This project is happening in phases. The first phase happens June 7th. We will be conducting an audit of the primary, effectively a parallel election.
The main goal of phase one is actually to shake out the tech make sure it's as bug free as possible and also that the blockchain that supports this tech can scale to meet the demands of a real election.
If you're interested in novel ways of using technology to help secure elections we could really use your help, because it's crunch time now.
First of all, if you live in California, we could use boots on the ground. Some of our volunteers and probably a sizable fraction of the voters will be technically illiterate. We need people on hand who can quickly troubleshoot the hardware, reboot devices and even just demonstrate the tech and walk people through the process if needs be. We've tried to make it as simple as possible. Literally, scan a QR code and press 1 button corresponding to your choice of candidate. But as simple as we've made it the process could still be confusing to some especially in the heat of the moment. If you're interested in helping out by being boots on the ground for us go here... https://www.democracycounts.org or here https://www.facebook.com/notes/election-justice-usa/independent-citizens-election-audit-to-be-conducted-in-select-precincts-in-calif/889795561147138 You can contact Dawn on facebook to be put directly into the volunteer pipeline.
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Secondly, over the course of the weekend we will be conducting a "dry run" poll. The purpose of this is just to test the software on the widest range of devices possible. If you have an android or iOS phone, you just download the software and give it a try. Feedback on the install process, the UI, etc would all be very helpful. Details will be made available on our technical discussion page sometime in the next 24 to 48hrs. https://nxtforum.org/index.php?topic=11226.0;all
Thirdly, we are using the NXT blockchain for this. There are presently a lack of full nodes with open APIs. So even just downloading a full NXT node and running it for the duration of the primary (takes a few days to sync the blockchain), would be a huge help because it adds nodes to the network making it much harder to attack. You can download the software from here... https://nxt.org/ and if you want to you can get a recent blockchain snapshot (which speeds up the process of getting in sync with the network) from here... http://www.peerexplorer.com/#Download
Thank you everyone!
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday June 04 2016, @02:41AM
No because it's not a printed receipt, it's hand written at their own discretion. Something like a post it note.
If they want to PROVE they voted a certain way they can pick any vote that goes the way they were being pressured to vote and still vote their own conscience in reality.
Furthermore any third party that wants someone to prove they voted a certain way can have absolutely 0 assurances that what they pressured for is the event that occurred, because anyone can view the public ledger, pick a desired vote and claim it was theirs. There is no way for the third party to say one way or the other.
We have the best of all possible worlds here.. The voter has an assurance that their vote counted whilst maintaining their choice of plausible deniability/claimability in the event of third party pressure.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 04 2016, @03:13AM
That fails to prevent fraud at all. You have to be able to prove your vote wasn't counted our you will have trolls and nutters and everyone will just ignore complaints. Once you can prove it is when the secret ballot fails.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday June 04 2016, @04:07AM
Again you say it fails, but you offer no support, just a provably false dichotomy.
You appear to be very confused. You are mixing concepts freely that don't mix, so allow me to be a bit more precise in my explanation.
#1 Fraud here means tampering either before or after the fact with the ballot count. This is the only type of fraud which we can assure against with a technical solution.
The technical solution involves securing the entries in the database against tampering. We accomplish this by taking a hash of the vote and an nonce, signing the hash with a public key. Then we broadcast that vote to the internet. Once on the internet it is timstamped again and placed in a public ledger. This ledger, by way of being public is visible to the world in near real time. No way to backdate or post date it because there is a consensus network at play. We call a distributed timestamping ledger driven by consensus rules a blockchain. Because that's the right word for it. This isn't buzzword bingo, it's just we have a name for a particular collection of concepts that functions as shorthand for the collective concept.
#2 Anonymity of the voter, while proving they had the right to vote. This is not a technical problem and there really is no technical solution. We do this the old fashioned way. The voter checks in and signs a paper roll. If they registered to vote they will be on the roll. If they are not registered to vote then they will not be on the roll and cannot vote. After they have signed in, they pick a number from a large group of random numbers. These numbers have ALL been authorized to vote ahead of time and the problem space is wide enough, that it is not plausible that there would be a collision. The voter now has a number. At this point, to the system the voter IS the number. There is no tie between the voter and the number other than the voter's possession of said number. They have wrote this number down. Once a vote is cast it is tied to that number forever, and the vote and the number are public at the time of casting. However there is no link between voter and number, ergo the voter remains anonymous, but we have verified their eligibility to vote.
#3 Vote Selling / Claimability. The voter can at any time view the same public ledger on any block explorer and point at any vote and say "hey that's my number! see I voted the way you asked me to!" They can do this whether or not they actually voted for that option. Ergo there is plausible deniability and also plausible claimability. It can and does go both ways. We do this specifically because it completely negates the ability for a pressure group to actually yield a valid result from their tactics whatever they may be. The voter is the only one really who knows whether or not they are telling the truth or lying. Kind of like mailinator for voting. In otherwords we make it so you can prove the truth to yourself and at the same time anything you want to demonstrate to anyone trying to get you to prove whatever.
Now you appear to claim that #3 will bring out trolls. We address that by standardizing on open hardware, using open source software and generally keeping the voting process secure. This is the part where we talk about turning this into an international standard for secure electronic voting. People can claim that there was a problem, and if there is a problem it can be quickly uncovered and corrected. In fact we move proceed at all times under the assumption that there is a problem and constantly try to prove the claim through whatever factual basis we can. This is in the aggregate though. An individual making a claim would also find the tools to support their claim are widely available, but the burden of proof is on them to support their claims. In general the entire process including hardware, software and people processes would be subject to re-certification on a regular basis. Failure to re-certify would be grounds for immediately questioning the entire vote.
So please, tell me how this fails?
(Score: 1) by ACE209 on Sunday June 05 2016, @12:13AM
The thing is, that you don't wan't something like this number that can be connected to a vote to exist at all.
It is not a side effect, that you can't check your vote. This is by design.
With your solution, someone still needs to take the time to find a number proving he voted the right way.
This might leave holes for exploitation. Not having such a prove of vote is really the most elegant and far reaching solution here.