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Comment by flangola7 | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain techbros have thoroughly burned up the good will that society grants new technologies, and earned it a distrust until proven otherwise state. There's even an XKCD on this exact topic: https://xkcd.com/2030/

>have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity.

Seeing as how disinformation is a gigantic problem these days, this is a better use of their time than trying to reinvent a wheel that already works. Implementing a transparent verifiable blockchain backed voting system will not reduce election fraud conspiracy theories because those belief systems were not arrived at through rational logic in the first place.

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Until it’s a result you don’t like. Have you ever considered the possibility that there are places where election systems can’t be trusted? I’m sure you’ll be just as supportive of the Russian-led vote in occupied regions of Ukraine.

My proposal was for provable voting systems in conflict regions. It stems from my experience on the ground supporting the 2014 election in Afghanistan. People all over the world risk their lives to vote, and they, normal primitive farmers with no education, demand proof that it was done fairly. The current method is a line of people showing their hands, then one by one, marking a wall and walking out with purple thumbs.

But really, the place and the situation is irrelevant. I find your response both abhorrent and stereotypical.

And you think an uneducated rural farmer is going to trust some numbers you show them? If they think the election is unfair, you going on about blockchain this and zero knowledge proof that is just going to convince them that you're making shit up in order to support a stolen election. The purple thumb proof works way better there.

The academics are right and you're wasting your time, sorry.

Purple thumbs are a pretty good system, and they were definitely not convinced by voting machines, nor paper ballots. But, it's a physical security nightmare. My job was to keep IEDs out of the polling places. There are many more issues such as multiple voting, cross-district voting, cross-border voting, voter intimidation, retaliation, etc.

And imagine an academic suggesting that it's not practical. The most celebrated academic result of the last 25 years in the field was a crypto system that would take a thousand years to multiply one-bit numbers.

Regardless, you're right. It is a waste of time. There's no funding. Academia is like consulting. You make money by telling people what they want to hear. I've become more aware of this.

There are numerous ways to hold a transparent election. Russia is not choosing those ways. Adding a new option does not change this. You earn 0 points for pointing out that Russia is choosing a non transparent, obviously fraudulent system.

> https://xkcd.com/2030/

I really hate this attitude. This is a very common belief held by non-technical people. They believe that it is impossible to have perfect security, and that every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers.

I truly believe one day a cryptographic voting system will be rolled out, but it's a long way away, not because for technical reasons, but for cultural reasons.

Did you just call Randall Munroe a non-technical person?

> They believe that it is impossible to have perfect security, and that every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers.

Yes. I do believe that.

every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers

...or it's not worth hacking -- this is what your statement leaves out.

Nobody is going to be searching for bugs in cat(1) when there are bigger prizes out there.

> one day

There's the keyword.

And that day is not today.

Paper is fine. Let's use paper.

These voting machines that can be tracelessly hacked with a pen drive are terrifying, and no, there isn't enough awareness of that fact among people.

What do you propose to do with paper? Mostly it just gets fed into a machine. Is it impossible to vote twice with paper? Is it impossible to throw away paper? Is it impossible to miscount paper?

Paper doesn't impart any security property by itself. Can paper be used in a secure system? Maybe. Can a machine be used in a secure system? Maybe. Is all paper secure? No. Is any machine secure? No. Same for blockchain, mobile, internet, satellite, and ouija boards.

Do you have credentials or sources for these odd claims and false equivalences?

Do you have them on paper?

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