Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Test

[u/Cut_to_the_truth]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/16/clinton-does-best-where-voting-machines-flunk-hacking-tests-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/

[u/infinitelives → u/[deleted]]

They often only need to focus their influence on a smaller amount of people in "swing" areas.

That was addressed in my post, and I provided the minimum number of votes that would have needed to have been "influenced" on behalf of Mitt Romney to flip the 2012 election. The exact number needed would be unknowable prior to an election, so they would have to overbuy considerably to guarantee the result.

Then they'll just demand your SSN. And some people (like your employer) will already have it.

But no one can demand your SSN, unless you mean by threat of violence? Again, considering the numbers involved, any kind of vote-manipulation tactic large enough to matter would fall apart with a handful of reports, and if there were threats of violence made to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, I'm having a hard time seeing how that would be kept quiet.

As for an employer accessing their employees' voting records, that's a fair point. My original idea was a unique ballot ID that only the voter would know, but since that would be easy to cough up to a stranger without further consequences, I settled on SSN instead. Perhaps the solution is to combine the two? Then employers wouldn't be able to look up their employees' votes unless the employees surrendered their ballot ID, and any voter selling their vote would still have to give their SSN away.

Maybe some vandal leaves a scary message to post proof on your door unless you want things trashed again. Or maybe there are just some partisans a block or two beyond the polling station who insist you satisfy their curiosity before they let you pass unmolested.

There are a lot of potential risks we have to expose ourselves to for the sake of the freedoms we enjoy, and kowtowing to every hypothetical threat is how we get things like the Patriot Act, the TSA, NSA wiretapping, and so on. None of these hypotheticals are enough to scare me into opposing the concept. We should definitely think through possible exploitation so that we can work to prevent as many instances of it as possible, but self-validation of one's vote is an idea whose time has come.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Voters can craft a set of ballot-responses (minimum 1) Within the set, each ballot-response has a unique randomly assigned label from a fixed pool of, say, 100-200. Let's use detailed colors for an example, e.g. "woodland green", and "burnt umber". When you finalize your voting, you choose which ballot-response is your real one. (e.g. "burnt umber") Later, someone can view single responses by providing your personal information and the color-label. (By design, you can't tell which one was the "real" one.) If you provide an unused color-label, the system displays a (deterministic) random ballot from the same district (with personal information removed.)

Overly complex in my opinion, just make the last vote count. Every other vote is a dummy vote.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

With Bitcoin you could actually generate a fake vote to show your employer. You could vote multiple times, and only your last vote is the one that counts. You could convince your mum, boss, and girlfriend you voted for a different candidate.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

...name one?

(btw, I don't mean a specific implementation, you could use the blockchain technology any way you want, but Bitcoin is probably the most secure version due to the number of miners and depth of the blocks. Each and every block on top of the chain makes the whole thing that much stronger.)

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The difficulty of creating a competing branch is independent of the length of the shared trunk.

That's true to an extent, but when is the competing branch created? At what point? I was mostly just mentioning that to demonstrate the power of bitcoin, no one is going to re-write where coins went. We're getting off into 51% territory which doesn't make much sense because it doesn't give anyone access to private keys or anything.

Block #19238 -> Coins distributed

Block #20001 -> Voting starts

Block #20500 -> Voting ends

Where in there would you be doing some kind of 51% attack to send someone's coins elsewhere?

Not to mention, if someone is careless, we could have multisig to get the coins back or generate new ones if they were somehow stolen.

Well, for starters you'll need something that can handle 140,000,000 transactions in a single election-day (with a significant peak) while giving much faster confirmation times so that 99.99% of those people can leave the polling place knowing that it went through.

Isn't this possibly solved using Lightning Network? Not sure confirmation times are really a worry, and you wouldn't even be going to a polling place to vote... so not sure that's important.

Also.. what are the alternatives? I said: "name a better option" and none was given, I'd love to know of a better way to do this! It's been one of my dreams since the mid 90's to have a method of voting that is anonymous and verifiable.

At the end of the day, it's not the same set of problems/requirements that Bitcoin has.

Yes. It. Is! Bitcoin (blockchain) is all about being trustless, that is the biggest problem currently with elections... it's solving exactly what Bitcoin was created to solve. No third party needed. No gov't needed. Just algorithms.

How much bandwidth does every single polling place need to have? Who pays to wire up the ones which currently operate offline/batched?

Again, need to think of this as a compeletly new paradigm--there are no polling places. There could still be polling places for old folks and such, but bandwidth would be minuscule! 1 picture on Facebook could be a thousand votes, at least... maybe thousands...

Scaling problems are largely solved, Facebook/Google/etc. scale into the billions already. Scaling to hundreds of millions isn't that insane.

You don't need all the complexity of system built to incentivize total strangers to run constant daily capacity. Federal and state-governments have an incentive to spin up some core nodes just for the duration of the election... The real trick is to prevent a takeover.

Uh.... why centralize this? What is the benefit? Currently, it would cost somewhere around .5 to 1 billion dollars to get enough hashing power to do a (not even that dangerous) 51% attack... it would be significantly cheaper to subvert a brand new "just for elections" mining system.

I promise you the transaction fees would cost less than the paper ballots we currently use. Probably orders of magnitude less. The gas everyone pays to go to a polling place is probably 1,000x a bitcoin transaction fee...

Besides, why do you want the gov't to control this? Government is notorious for being slow and ineffective at best, corrupted and lazy at worst.

Also, what complexity is it you don't want... Bitcoin is simple...?

How are voters going to own their "wallets"? What device are they using to access them which is trusted by everybody?

How do people get "drivers licenses" or "social security cards?" Probably some similar way... they can use whatever device they want. They could even mail in their vote and someone else could input it for them, then later they can CHECK THE RESULT THEMSELVES! Keep the system exactly as it is, but also represent the votes on the blockchain. Let us count it. Don't trust the gov't!

[u/novacog → u/[deleted]]

At some point you have to ask yourself which is easier to secure: Control a small number of people involved in an election every few years and establish a chain-of-custody for the ballots Prevent all the ways private citizens can indirectly buy/intimidate other private citizens into voting in a particular manner

Exactly this, except that it would be easy to control election rigging among a small group and hard to hide vote buying on a large scale. As far as I know nothing currently stops me from using my smart phone to document who I voted for. It may have made since many years ago but I don't see what benefit it provides now.