I wasted years of my life in crypto

I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There's absolutely no reason that a driver's license can't derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block's information when you finish voting.

ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, identity is kept secret, trust is installed with hash checks for each and every voter - etc etc etc.

It's certainly more airtight than the solution we have today - where trust and efficiency can both be compromised fairly easy.

You're describing a transparency log, which doesn't require a blockchain.

you can also juststore hashes in a normal database.

If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed.

Typically one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted, e.g. to stop someone from going, prove you voted for my candidate or i beat you up (or dont give you the bribe). Your scheme wouldn't support that.

What if one doesn't have a car and a driver's license?

> identity is kept secret,

Except to anyone who sees your driver license.

There are schemes for this, but it requires much more than just a hash. You need not only asymmetric cryptography, but some sort of Zero Knowledge Proof if you don’t want to be able to identify the person who voted.

>"If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed."

Sure, I suppose. You'd need zero knowledge proofs for the reversals anyway.

>"one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted"

Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system; so 2/3 aren't supported now anyway. That said, my scheme DOES support all of those; it wouldn't tell you the identity of the person that voted for "Person A", so bribery or extortion is NOT in the cards.

If you somehow get access to someone's license, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted. And like I said to another commenter, if they beat you to a vote by using your ID (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad - but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification methods. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.

If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot. People brag all the time with photos of their ballot on election time - that's your choice.

A transparency log, as I understand them, requires a centralized actor; which makes it easier to fudge numbers and introduce false participants.

Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important:

> ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes

This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they could learn to do it, they don't have the time and energy and other resources to spend on this.

And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.

I said this in a response to someone else:

>"If you somehow get access to someone's license plate, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted."

If they beat you to your drivers license information (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad, but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification mediums. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.

No, because each participant can check its contribution in the log.

Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote.

The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).

>"Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain"

Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies.

>"This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works."

Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

There is no more wasted time, energy, or blind trust than in the current system, and at least introducing zero knowledge proofs, blockchain (or another system) and cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman from any given savvy person, of which there's many. Even in the long term. As it its, it's not like independent researchers or cryptography nerds haven't called out institutional-wide folly; it's what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG, and was promptly laughed out the door for any serious cryptographer and highly publicized.

As for the rest, it's well known that the data is collected and retained on voter information as it is. We're seeing states like Colorado, just this past week, deny giving the current federal administration voter data from the previous election. You can reasonably predict roughly half of America's voting anyway; when their timeline of party affiliation AND the knowledge of whether they voted or not is already public information.

I see what you're saying now, I was imagining the type of transparency log that's usually run by a single institution and audited by a few others.

Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in the event that there's not a ton of replication - hoping that wouldn't be the case in an election.

With a (properly designed) blockchain, you at least push those assumptions into a consensus layer with many writers/validators and game-theory penalties for rewriting its history. It's still not magic; but for something like elections, I'd rather minimize the points where a single operator can tilt the playing field, which is why I was thinking "blockchain" instead of "centralized transparency log"

Who validates the driver's license?

How do you stop inauthentic licenses?

Perhaps some sort of central authority?

This is the main problem with most of the blockchain/crypto issues is that its all fine until a dispute, and then we all fall back to the state to sort it out (ie the legal system)

> cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman

what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.

You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.

Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )

Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)

> Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system

Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.

That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.

---

> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.

And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.

In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure.

>>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.

And it's currently not the case at all.

I think blockchain is a terrible idea for about anything. Electronic voting is hard. Voting is hard. It doesn't change the fact that the current system is a complete security joke .

It is extremely easy to convince yourself that the current system works. Numerous people volunteer to work in election monitoring every year, and any person who is not sure can take a day or two off work to do so at their next election.

Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.

Yup. I did this in 2020 and came away pleased at how well the system was designed.

> Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.

In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.

The "current election system", in the US, is not one single system. It is much closer to 50 separate systems with their own differences that range from quirks to wildly different fundamentals.

You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.

> what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.

I don't think people really need it. We're used to using and trusting systems we don't understand. So, I think if the system is open, people will readily accept it. They'll be content with knowing that all the experts say the system is reliable, and they themselves, theoretically, can, if they want, understand its structure and confirm its reliability.

And the real reason for its non-use is somewhat different: The elites believe that the introduction of such a system would almost immediately lead to demands for real direct democracy, and the stupid masses, using this democracy, would make decisions that would destroy society and civilization.

>"Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter."

They still negate 2/3 of his necessities.

Same problems we have today. For the state, at an institutional scale, the incumbent can just have a government agency make up individuals born, or make up SSN numbers, or make up required parameters for one to have a valid voting ID in order to have a bunch of fake people issue fake ballots - because government agencies are currently responsible for instituting the legitimate ones, and its an unchecked procedure. And that's one of the less intuitive methods for bypassing current election systems.

There are ways to decentralize that as well; and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea. Decentralization is empowerment, it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency, AND a flexibility for more direct and meaningful checks and balances on both an individual level, and a collective level.

> make up required parameters for one to have a valid voting ID in order to have a bunch of fake people issue fake ballots

I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler.

Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web.

I mean sure you _could_ print 20 million IDs/SSN/Drivers license, then pay a few hundreds of thousands of people to go and vote illegally. But thats expensive, take time, and leaves a massive massive paper trail back to you. its much easier to buy access to a dipshit billionaire and get them to force the bullshit down their network.

> Decentralization is empowerment

In some instances yes, but for things that backstop identity, its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)

> it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency,

transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal.

>"I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler."

There's a lot more on the line for first-world nations, financially and functionally. Also, you'll notice I conceded that point in the last sentence in that same paragraph: "And that's one of the less intuitive methods for bypassing current election systems."

>"Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web."

I'm not actually that concerned about midterms, I'm concerned about the macro implications of the existing electoral process (and theory, but that's a separate discussion) when we have better tooling for decentralized transparency/accountability and leverage - both for an individual and the collective - than we did during its ratification. I'm concerned its ripe for abuse with a passionate actor in general (that may or may not include individuals within our current administration), and your dismissal isn't too assuring.

>"its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)"

A lot of initiatives are trying to fix deterministic identification in digital formats now, some with good intentions and others with not.

>"transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal."

This isn’t actually true; transparency always rests on some power structure that both has access to the relevant information and can punish non-disclosure. That power doesn’t have to be a single superior authority, though. You can design systems where transparency is enforced laterally - a network of entities with roughly symmetric power, each able to observe and sanction the others, so that the tension between them produces real transparency and accountability.

In my country there is usually a recount in some "suspicious" voting stations. The recount about never gives the same results as the original count. People are not very good at counting even if they have good intentions.

>>First grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.

-people are bad at counting

-some people might be bad at counting on purpose

-some people might try to influence the results

This happens all the time as proven by multiple recounts. I am not talking about USA here but about EU countries but I imagine it's the same in USA. You just hope those swings are small enough to not influence the end results. I am sure this is usually true but sometimes it's close and then the odds are at least some of those elections went the wrong way.

These kind of things are part of transparency log threat models, for example: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html#page-24.

No, just publish the hash of the full log. No blockchain required at all. Anybody can check they are seeing the same log as others by checking the log hash.