Author Topic: Provably Honest Online Elections are Possible  (Read 3258 times)

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Offline Troglodactyl

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Keep reinventing until you have a wheel that the target market accepts and uses.  It sounds to me like the Follow My Vote project is making good progress.

I thought the article was great, also.


Offline jsidhu

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In software development do you always write all the code yourself or do you use a library at times? Never redo hard work. Build on top of it.
I thought you meant why persue VOTE.. Its always a good idea to use tools to complete your idea
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charleshoskinson

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In software development do you always write all the code yourself or do you use a library at times? Never redo hard work. Build on top of it.

Offline jsidhu

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Why are you reinventing the wheel? This has already been resolved by helios and others: https://vote.heliosvoting.org http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/. Second no mention of linear preference ordering systems like condorcet and Borda counts. I'd encourage you to visit http://accurate-voting.org.

We have delegates (working to increase GDP), we have means of voting them in... I say it's worth a shot at inventing a wheel which will help us learn and gain traction in the voting tech industry... once we are good at it.. we can apply it to how we vote for delegates and proposals to merge BTS with new features etc... I say it fits within the model of bitshares.
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Offline luckybit

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Why are you reinventing the wheel? This has already been resolved by helios and others: https://vote.heliosvoting.org http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/. Second no mention of linear preference ordering systems like condorcet and Borda counts. I'd encourage you to visit http://accurate-voting.org.

I agree with this post.  +5%

There are solutions which aren't being fully reviewed .
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Offline arhag

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Second no mention of linear preference ordering systems like condorcet and Borda counts. I'd encourage you to visit http://accurate-voting.org.

I'm pretty sure that is at a higher level than what BitShares intends to do for voting at the blockchain level. As far as I am aware, BitShares Vote basically consists of choosing a subset of globally-unique entities who freely register to cast a ballot for a given election and collecting the single latest opaque ballot of each pseudonymous entity unique to the election that has an unknown (say through ring signatures) one-to-one correspondence to the globally-unique entities in the subset. Any given validator can choose their own subset using a filter that is based on the public properties associated with each globally-unique entity (such as whether they are eligible to vote and the congressional district they live in as claimed with appropriate signatures by some set of identity verifiers that are assumed to not be colluding together) and can choose their own interpretation of the data within the opaque ballot (allowing for a variety of possible voting methods). The blockchain doesn't have to care about any of that; only the clients of the validators do. In fact I expect to see a proper API in the BitShares client so that people could write their own scripts / third-party open-source clients that interface with the BitShares client to obtain the verified ballots and interpret and tally the votes as they wish.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2014, 07:47:53 pm by arhag »

Offline Thom

For those who don't see a problem with the current state of voting in America, either with paper or electronic ballots, check out the work done by Beverly Harris of Blackbox Voting on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=BlackBox+Voting) or at http://blackboxvoting.org/.

The fraud is well documented. I have withdrawn my participation and thus my support of this fraud, tho in my rural setting it may not be taking place.  It still is a form of statism which I oppose philosophically.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2014, 06:23:56 pm by Thom »
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere - MLK |  Verbaltech2 Witness Reports: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23902.0.html

charleshoskinson

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Why are you reinventing the wheel? This has already been resolved by helios and others: https://vote.heliosvoting.org http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/. Second no mention of linear preference ordering systems like condorcet and Borda counts. I'd encourage you to visit http://accurate-voting.org.


merockstar

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I'm glad you're doing this blog. Definitely worth your time. You're the best person to explain most of this stuff and a lot of people are going to go to your blog before they ever come here.

Offline bytemaster

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Offline matt608

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« Last Edit: December 21, 2014, 04:59:36 pm by matt608 »

Offline luckybit

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http://bytemaster.github.io/article/2014/12/21/Provably-Honest-Online-Elections/

Please submit pull requests with any typo's.

I have some concerns.

1) Your basic assumptions might not be good to use for these purposes. Why not use the basic assumption that governments are oppressive. That oppressive regimes will use physical or psychological violence to subvert the democratic processes. That coercion resistance is necessary to determine whether or not the vote is from an independent decision maker or from a dependent decision maker who lacks free will.

2) The voting needs to be computational to take advantage of the algorithmic digital nature of the technology. So far we seem to be talking about recreating analog equivalents instead of going beyond the capabilities of manual voting.

For example you can do conditional voting and there is an entire field of computational voting theory which can come into play here. This can allow for introductions to possibilities which simply are impossible to do with paper based voting.

In my opinion voting has to be redefined. It's not going to be enough to simply try to mirror the analogue. For example you could easily make voting anonymous by using autonomous agents which vote on behalf of voters. The owner of the voting agent would be whomever knows the secret code so they would be able to track their votes but the vote wouldn't come from them.

3) We should aim for implementing provably coercion resistant voting. This has been theoretically proven in a research paper titled: Coercion Resistant End-to-end Voting.  In my opinion we should adapt that solution to Bitshares VOTE.

Quote
Benaloh states that we can never guarantee voter privacy, citing an example
that one can never prove that hidden cameras are not installed at the voting
booth [13]. He is correct in the absolute sense and considers strict privacy only
in the setting where parties and machines are honest. Despite the impossibility
of unconditional certainties in practice, however, it remains important to consider
privacy in the face of dishonest machines. We can still reduce the types of
attacks adversaries can perform and minimize threats of large scale coercion by
applying a stronger theoretical model. Ideally, end-to-end voting schemes achieve
the following properties:

Individual Verifiability- The voter should be able to verify that her intentions
were accurately recorded in her cast ballot.
Universal Verifiability- Voters should be able to verify that all cast ballots
were properly included in the final tallies and came from legitimate voters.
Mandatory Privacy- No one should be able to learn how another voter voted
with certainty even if the voter would like that person to know.

Reference

Coercion Resistant End-to-end Voting
https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~sdoshi/index_files/randomness_paper.pdf

"Computational Voting Theory: Game-Theoretic and Combinatorial Aspects" (CRCS Lunch Seminar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKLy8uSy2SQ

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Offline bytemaster


This kind of thing will need examples.

I brought it up to my colleague he helped count votes here in canada and he said its pretty accurate with multiple steps of human verificatiom amd people dont really consider it anproblem.. theres no conspiracy.

Only way general population will believe this is necessary is if an example can be drawn from. Maybe ancient wellknowm rigged polls that people came to realize after the fact.. because we do know todays elections if rigged are very good at hiding.

maybe a chapter on the evolution of voting trickery becsuse the illusionists as you refer to must have made mistakes over the decades and these would have been documented.. give a timeline of events.

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Offline jsidhu

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This kind of thing will need examples.

I brought it up to my colleague he helped count votes here in canada and he said its pretty accurate with multiple steps of human verificatiom amd people dont really consider it anproblem.. theres no conspiracy.

Only way general population will believe this is necessary is if an example can be drawn from. Maybe ancient wellknowm rigged polls that people came to realize after the fact.. because we do know todays elections if rigged are very good at hiding.

maybe a chapter on the evolution of voting trickery becsuse the illusionists as you refer to must have made mistakes over the decades and these would have been documented.. give a timeline of events.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2014, 02:20:36 pm by jsidhu »
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Offline matt608

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I made lots of additions and made a pull request on github, I think I did it right.  First time on github.