Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiddy | Hacker News Reader

retraction of vote with a new vote solves this.

Since I'm able to retract my vote, I cannot sell it. And since I can retract my vote, I cannot be coerced in any way.

"Updating a vote" was supported in 2021 Russian Parliament elections (for Moscow voters). Written in Rust, built on a blockchain with contracts. Source code: [1]. No way blockchain voting can be rigged! It is protected by math!

It immediately raised a suspicion, could the government use "updating a vote" to change the vote of the voter after they voted. There were suspicious bursts of votes for government candidates during early morning (3:00-12:00 AM) between 2nd and 3rd voting days. Could it be re-votings? Who knows, public blockchain has no way to find this out.

How can an observer distinguish between a real voter voting the second time, and the government voting second time in his name?

Furthermore, to cancel the previous vote, you need some way to link the new and old ballots. In the case above, there was a non-public database (a blockchain), unavailable to observers, which kept the needed information. And theoretically it could allow de-anonymize the voters.

So what I wanted to say that electronic voting is a garbage only convenient for fraudsters.

[1] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting_202...

russian "elections"

Yes Russia shows that even smartest math can be worked around. Everyone who wants to know the real vulnerabilities of electronic voting should study Russian elections.

Elections results have to be final at some point, and after that point no further retraction/changes can be made, therefore you can be coerced.

coerced at the time of voting, but then you can go back and simply change it again

And then you can be coerced again, and again, until the vote is final.

there is a limit of how many people you can be physically present to coerce up to end of election, making it inviable en mass, thus impractical.

Social pressure can make it scale pretty well. For example, there could be a neighborhood election day party. You vote when you enter, the organizers observe how you vote, and then you leave your devices in a storage locker. The party continues until voting has ended and the results have been announced.

You are over-engineering. You do not need to coerce a voter if you are the administrator and can just add the record into the database directly. Also no need to spend money for a party.

All reasonable high-stakes electoral systems assume that election officials cannot be trusted. There is no central database that can be manipulated.

Traditionally there are people representing different parties watching over each other, until they eventually publish the intermediate results from whatever region they are responsible for. And all aggregate results beyond that are based on public information. Some people want to replace that with cryptographic systems with provable properties. But any system that lets you vote anywhere remains vulnerable to voter coercion.

"People watching over each other" usually do not have root (or any) access to the servers, they are usually only shown aggregated stats (like number of votes cast). They usually do not have access to voter details like IP addresses, phone numbers, fingerprints. In some cases, they can read the public "blockchain", but not the private one (in systems with 2 blockchains). The blockchain doesn't contain much useful information to verify, only votes.

The ones who have actual access, are from the government.

> if you are the administrator and can just add the record into the database directly

And because of that, the final truth is never in the database, but in the physical votes. Which results in a huge problem if there are no physical votes.

how would one know? they're they know a transaction happened, but they do not see the contents of a transaction

Reply on news.ycombinator.com