integrity, privacy and verifiability and the blockchain

[brinerustle]

This statement left me perplexed: *In the work led by researchers Hosp & Vora, an Information Theory approach was taken to model voting systems leading to the conclusion that a natural tension exists with a system aiming for perfect integrity, perfect ballot secrecy and perfect tally verifiability. All three cannot be simultaneously achieved when an adversary is computationally unbounded, able to brute force a system if unlimited time or memory are available.

For this reason we consider indispensable to implement digital democracies using blockchains.*

I asked Vora, and this was Poorvi's response: **Block chains do not solve any voting problem that is today unsolved.

In fact, they have less security for voting than the current research grade voting systems, a couple of which have been deployed in small governmental elections.

Security issues with the block chain approach:

1. You need to trust the computer the voter is voting from, because it encrypts the vote, or solves the hard problem, or creates the link in the block chain and performs the cryptographic operations that provide security in the block chain---such as encryption, digital signatures and authentication. In particular, it can change the vote without the voter's knowledge. But the central problem in voting security is that the voter's computer cannot be trusted as it can have malware.
2. Similarly, the voter's computer also knows the vote and hence so can malware on the computer. This poses risks to ballot secrecy and voter anonymity.
3. The use of peers for the creation of the ledger allows votes to be ignored, such as those coming from IP addresses that appear to be from an opposing political viewpoint. Additionally, authentication information could also identify the voter and allow for votes to be ignored, resulting in a distributed denial of service attack.

The distributed ledger could be useful to make available public information about an election, but it would still need to be controlled by an election authority to ensure that information is not selectively distributed or displayed. One could distributed the ledger among officials; however, this is already possible using hash chains.

Poorvi**

[Tasty213]

1. After voting you can visibly see the way your vote was casted and if it is not correct then you can revoke it by the same way you revoke delegations when your delegate misrepresents you

Three 3. The votes can be audited by anyone this means that any incorrect conclusion can be easily disputed.

[santisiri]

1. you assume we are thinking along the lines of e-voting machines yet you fail to see we are really asking fundamental questions about governance as a whole. the hardware problem ultimately boils down to the fact that you will never trust a piece of hardware more than your own personal gear. so either democracy becomes personal or we keep surrendering to intermediation of power by authority. we are going the distance: democracy for all in its most scalable form.

2. you know those arguments where done before e-banking too, right?

3. @Tasty213 nails it. blockchains serve another function of democratic process which is not the vote casting per se but the persmissionless auditing rights, which is precisely the remaining centralized function of status quo elections. we can now rely on executing budget allocation with smart contracts, effectively removing the need for permanent (corruptible) authority to more dynamic forms of leadership/governance.