[HN Gopher] Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed but ...
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Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed but underrated
among informed
Author : karlicoss
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-10-22 22:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vitalik.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.ca)
| [deleted]
| aazaa wrote:
| This article reminds me of every other article I've seen about
| blockchain voting. None of them start with a threat model. None
| of them talk about what's broken with voting. Mostly they just
| dive into technology, relying on the reader's imagination to
| address these points.
|
| Here are some simple questions:
|
| 1. What are you trying to protect in a vote?
|
| 2. Why can't an SQL database with whatever levels of
| cryptographic assurance you'd like to add do the job?
|
| 3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology
| does, regardless of cost?
|
| These questions are never answered, and indeed they are not
| answered here either. Instead, these articles lead with
| technology and rarely get around to what matters.
|
| Often there's something like this included in the article:
|
| > Blockchains are a technology which is all about providing
| guarantees about process integrity. If a process is run on a
| blockchain, the process is guaranteed to run according to some
| pre-agreed code and provide the correct output. No one can
| prevent the execution, no one can tamper with the execution, and
| no one can censor and block any users' inputs from being
| processed.
|
| No. A block chain is a timestamping mechanism. Within certain
| very narrow boundaries, it makes certain guarantees about the
| relative ordering of events. A tamper-resistant log file? Yes. A
| solution to voting? Does that involve relative event ordering? If
| so, is that the _central_ problem?
|
| Electronic cash systems like Bitcoin will work work just fine
| without a blockchain, provided they can solve the double spending
| problem. Bitcoin solved it with a system for ordering
| transactions based on proof-of-work. There are other solutions,
| but all suffer from censorship pressures in ways that Bitcoin
| does not.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology
| does, regardless of cost?
|
| Not defending blockchain, but this seems like an absurdly high
| standard. To me, the cost of a technology is definitely one
| factor in evaluating what is better or worse for solving a
| given problem.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I somewhat agree, but with the amount of money that has
| already been spent on failed electronic voting systems, I
| think "regardless of cost" is pretty accurate here.
| ggm wrote:
| Non repudiation and transactional sequencing and public Ledger,
| no problem. Merkle trees, no problem. Block chain is instant
| problem. It's just crap marketing of fundamental concepts that we
| need and do use.
|
| It's like confating good statistical methods with marginal use
| cases for the techniques.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Could it be that the informed and uninformed are simply at
| different stages of the Gartner hype cycle?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
|
| The informed might now become fully aware of all the limitations
| and problems with it which might cause them to swing too far the
| other way, in contrast to their previous optimism.
|
| At the same time, however, being aware of these limitations
| hasn't become mainstream, so the uninformed have to go off of
| other information - marketing materials and hand wavy
| explanations of how blockchain will eventually be good for a
| large variety of problems.
|
| The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, as it has with
| most technologies.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Most people understand that you can trade speed or quality. I do
| not understand why the uniformed public thinks learning about
| potentially inaccurate election results quickly is preferable to
| accurate election results slower.
| nemetroid wrote:
| I'm happy that this article recognizes the need for coercion
| resistance. But the second problem is stated too weakly: the
| issue isn't that voting software is insecure, it's that it's too
| complex.
|
| You could convince a person who doesn't know how to read that
| paper ballots are a working system (vote box is empty; votes go
| into box; box is emptied and all votes tallied). Only a small
| fraction of society could be convinced of the correctness of the
| tallying scheme in Fig. 2.
|
| You could argue that there are a lot of facets of modern society
| that the average citizen doesn't understand the details of, but
| voting is the cornerstone of democracy. Public trust in the
| voting system is crucial. The only way to reliably achieve that
| is through an understandable system, and so far the only
| understandable voting system I've seen is paper ballots.
| tehjoker wrote:
| While the US system is completely ossified and unresponsive to
| popular demands, proposals to make voting on everything both
| ignore the power dynamics at play, voter fatigue, and history.
|
| In the 1789 French revolution, they did try having votes to try
| to get more and more government officials elected after the
| overthrow of the ancien regime, but the votes were so frequent
| that people stopped showing up and the elections became barely
| legitimate.
|
| Other than that, software elections are prime for tampering, and
| even if they are determined to be secure by experts, suddenly the
| mechanisms of democracy are opaque to the masses and become
| untrustworthy. Making votes less understandable de-legitimizes
| them.
|
| Lastly, the reason for the ossification of American democracy is
| due to the fundamental oligarchical design of the 1776
| constitution that explicitly saw mass politics as mob rule and
| feared it. They designed the branches of government as a series
| of baffles to counter popular sway over policy making, hence a
| Presidency that requires a vote so large they are responsible to
| no one in particular (though originally they were elected
| indirectly by electors), a Senate that was indirectly elected and
| designed to void popular proposals coming from the house, and a
| supreme court with lifetime terms that are totally unelected. As
| an aside, their theory of the separation of powers was that the
| elites would be mostly in agreement on fundamental issues and
| fight over control of the branches of government. They were in
| large part wrong, factions of opposing interests developed and
| managed to capture the entire government in cycles (so we are
| living in an edge failure case of the original design).
|
| This system, plus the domination of the economy by wealthy
| interests, first the slave owning planter class and later the
| capitalist corporate class, prevents and subverts popular
| democracy at every turn except where the public's preferences
| coincide with the real rulers.
|
| Voting is simply a preference expressed to the rulers. It doesn't
| in any way carry a mechanism for enforcement and enactment and is
| highly susceptible to all kinds of manipulation, especially when
| voters are individualized and do not deliberate in organizations
| and vote in blocks.
|
| If you want your voice heard, take to the streets and/or join an
| independent party that include non-electoral tactics such as
| strikes.
| ouid wrote:
| >Needless to say, this entire post is predicated on good
| blockchain scaling technology (eg. sharding) being available. Of
| course, if blockchains cannot scale, none of this can happen. But
| so far, development of this technology is proceeding quickly, and
| there's no reason to believe that it can't happen.
|
| The reason to believe it can't happen is that it hasn't. like
| factoring large numbers.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I am inclined to believe Vitalik on this. He's been very
| intellectually honest and straightforward about where crypto
| tech is and is not progressing.
| a-dub wrote:
| i've always thought the way to do this would be to combine paper
| based ballots with multiple counting apparatus that are operated
| by the competing parties and the state.
|
| i fill out my slip and i run it through the red machine, the blue
| machine and the county machine. they all display a hash/sum of
| the total counts thus far, i verify each machine has the same
| thing on its display, i put my paper into the lockbox at the end
| and done.
|
| of course the big threat is coercion. if they put a camera on
| their machine that sees me put my slip in, they can match my vote
| to my identity... but... since each party has representatives
| present to watch over their machines, they also can also check
| the machines of each other. (ops and election watching become one
| and the same)
|
| it would just be cheap cameras and arm socs with open source
| software. totally doable, i think.
|
| also, i'm sure there are things in that rich literature of voting
| crypto that could also help with obscuring voter identity... but
| hey, this would be a good start.
|
| it's not blockchain, but it takes one of the biggest ideas from
| cryptocurrency. (double/triple entry accounting)
| dvt wrote:
| First of all, this is an old article (also discussed at time of
| publication, I believe). Second of all, it seems to be a
| headline-grab during the "fake election" foment of earlier this
| year, and contains nothing particularly substantial.
|
| I will say, it's a bit funny that Buterin's thesis is "voting
| would become much more efficient, allowing us to do it much more
| often." This is just printed as _apriori_ true (and _good_ -- at
| least in a societal sense), but our democracy (at least in the
| States) is representative. In my heart of hearts, I 'd love to
| believe that a direct democracy is the "best" form of government
| -- tangentially, this is the argument of most DAOs.
| Unfortunately, I just don't think this is true. Most people are
| dumb, easily manipulated (not _coerced_ , as Buterin belabors).
| Dumb people voting all the time is a recipe for disaster.
|
| W. E. B. Du Bois makes a great case for this in his The Talented
| Tenth[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Tenth
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| The whole setup of blockchain voting ignores the vast economic
| pressures at play here. Blockchains only work if the payoff for
| cheating the system is lower than the cost of PoS or PoW or
| whatever consensus mechanism is at play.
|
| The issue is that the results of major elections have truly
| massive economic consequences.
|
| A president of the US has a powerful say over trillions of
| dollars in funding.
|
| Meanwhile, total mining revenue for something like Bitcoin is
| "only" $18 billion per year.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I think the Tom Scott video on electronic voting from years ago
| remains the most convincing argument to me that it's a bad idea
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs). To summarize, even
| assuming you can solve properties like correctness, censorship
| resistance, privacy and coercion resistance. The fundamental
| problem with digital is that any exploit of any of these
| properties you ever have scales really well. Messing with a paper
| election requires a lot of people working together across the
| entire country. A digital hack just requires one smart person
| knownjorbist wrote:
| HN's perception of what's going in the decentralization and
| crypto sphere - commonly grouped under the "web3" moniker - is
| startlingly out of touch. There is incredible engineering going
| on and it's hard to see past the cryptobro noise, but the
| cypherpunk thing well all fetishized in our early years is
| happening _now_, not in the 80s and 90s.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I didn't read this thoroughly enough for much comment, but this
| jumps out:
|
| > But voting also requires some crucial properties that
| blockchains do not provide:
|
| > Privacy: you should not be able to tell which candidate some
| specific voted for, or even if they voted at all
|
| While the content of the ballot is sacred, the act of
| participating in the election cannot be.
|
| The pollbook is a database, with all of the security and
| maintenance hassle a database implies.
|
| As an election officer and ballot Luddite, I also think that
| elections argue for lower tech in the case of the ballots.
|
| Tech is swell (reponding on a a Galaxy Note 10+ here) but
| tangible ballots seem a hedge against shenanigans that no multi-
| page mathematical proof of block-chainy grooviness can penetrate.
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(page generated 2021-10-22 23:00 UTC)