Bitcoin technology adapted into the voting system?

[the founder]

I could just picture it now:

Press Release:

buy-bitcoin-votes.com just launched.   Now you can do what your politicians have been doing for years,  you can buy and sell your bitcoin enabled votes to the highest bidder.

Just list your bitcoin enabled vote for sale on buy-bitcoin-votes.com and the politician of your choice will buy your bitcoin and cast the ballot himself.   It's the definition of western style democracy!

-----  you guys get the point right?

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

I could just picture it now:

Press Release:

buy-bitcoin-votes.com just launched.   Now you can do what your politicians have been doing for years,  you can buy and sell your bitcoin enabled votes to the highest bidder.

Just list your bitcoin enabled vote for sale on buy-bitcoin-votes.com and the politician of your choice will buy your bitcoin and cast the ballot himself.   It's the definition of western style democracy!

-----  you guys get the point right?

Buying those domains now.....

 

[imsaguy]

The point of the blockchain for voting is to prevent votes from going missing.  It isn't to prevent a person from voting 10 times.  All it does is verify that whatever my vote was, it is included, because if it weren't, the chain would be broken.  You provide a public record of voting hashes and give someone a receipt with their hash on it.  That person can then go and verify that their hash was indeed included.

[wareen]

Cryptography-supported voting mechanisms have already been proposed with solutions to all of the problems, even being forced to reveal your vote (so that you could never prove who you voted for to someone who paid you to vote for them).

Unfortunately the problem is always in the "make it easy, secure and understandable for everyone" part.
Also, governments are traditionally great fans of security by obscurity. That's what made the last large-scale electronic voting trial in my country a spectacular failure. They spent large amounts of money to advertise the system which was based on smartcards and closed source software - yipieh!

Even if the system would be sound from a theoretical point of view, as long as the actual implementation is not _absolutely_ transparent (ie. I can compile my own voting program with my own toolchain, on my own hardware and can generate my own private key from my own RNG) then I would fight tooth and nail against it! I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

I understand that making such a thing workable for everyone is really really hard but there's simply too much at stake here...

I fear however, that most governments are not yet ready for 21st century democracy...

[DeathAndTaxes]

The point of the blockchain for voting is to prevent votes from going missing.  It isn't to prevent a person from voting 10 times.  All it does is verify that whatever my vote was, it is included, because if it weren't, the chain would be broken.  You provide a public record of voting hashes and give someone a receipt with their hash on it.  That person can then go and verify that their hash was indeed included.

Except you don't need a block chain to accomplish that.  A public website could provide a hash lookup service for you to determine if you hash was included.  Bitcoin or more specifically blocks don't do anything to make evoting secure.  If you also provide each voter with the hash of the prior vote then it becomes difficult to "inject" votes into the official record as it will break the chain.   If I vote and my vote shows up but the official record has a different hash for the prior vote then I will be contacting election officials.

[casascius]

I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

The kind of idea I envisioned is if a private provider produced the entire run of ballots, which worked like lottery tickets.  They had private keys (or pre-signed cryptographic messages) on them, and votes are cast simply by revealing a scratchoff and publishing the message underneath (e.g. it's a QR code that gets scanned).  A vote is void if more than one competing message for the same candidacy is published.

Now, we would have to trust the ballot provider.  But suppose each time somebody voted, they rolled two dice, and double sixes meant their ballot should be submitted for audit.  By this, I mean all keys would be revealed and published and the integrity of the ballot verified... then the voter gets a replacement ballot.  This would mean on average, 1 in 36 ballots would be sacrificed for integrity checks.  Slightly under 3% of the ballots would be subject to audit, but even such a small percentage would make it statistically impossible to rig them.

[SgtSpike]

I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

The kind of idea I envisioned is if a private provider produced the entire run of ballots, which worked like lottery tickets.  They had private keys (or pre-signed cryptographic messages) on them, and votes are cast simply by revealing a scratchoff and publishing the message underneath (e.g. it's a QR code that gets scanned).  A vote is void if more than one competing message for the same candidacy is published.

Now, we would have to trust the ballot provider.  But suppose each time somebody voted, they rolled two dice, and double sixes meant their ballot should be submitted for audit.  By this, I mean all keys would be revealed and published and the integrity of the ballot verified... then the voter gets a replacement ballot.  This would mean on average, 1 in 36 ballots would be sacrificed for integrity checks.  Slightly under 3% of the ballots would be subject to audit, but even such a small percentage would make it statistically impossible to rig them.

What would stop a person from acquiring many of said ballots to vote with?

[wareen]

What would stop a person from acquiring many of said ballots to vote with?

With all of these voting mechanisms you'd need an authority that initially confirmed your identity, your right to vote and that you didn't sign up for this process before.

There is no magical cryptographic process that would be able to find out who is allowed to vote. If you mean, what is stopping people from selling their vote (their private key), then I guess the answer is probably: nothing.

[casascius]

What would stop a person from acquiring many of said ballots to vote with?

Each vote must be tied to a voting precinct (or other localized unit of voting) in order to be counted.  This unit would be responsible for validating the identity of voters and distributing ballots to voters.

Each ballot would only be valid when a voting precinct issued a cryptographically signed statement publishing which ballots it had available to issue.

[imsaguy]

I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

The kind of idea I envisioned is if a private provider produced the entire run of ballots, which worked like lottery tickets.  They had private keys (or pre-signed cryptographic messages) on them, and votes are cast simply by revealing a scratchoff and publishing the message underneath (e.g. it's a QR code that gets scanned).  A vote is void if more than one competing message for the same candidacy is published.

Now, we would have to trust the ballot provider.  But suppose each time somebody voted, they rolled two dice, and double sixes meant their ballot should be submitted for audit.  By this, I mean all keys would be revealed and published and the integrity of the ballot verified... then the voter gets a replacement ballot.  This would mean on average, 1 in 36 ballots would be sacrificed for integrity checks.  Slightly under 3% of the ballots would be subject to audit, but even such a small percentage would make it statistically impossible to rig them.

Then I would double scratch all my opponents votes so they would get thrown out during an audit.

[giszmo]

pay one satoshi to each of your voters
set up a voting address for each option

hey, cool, bitcoin is a voting machine

What prevents me from voting with any x number of more satoshi's of my own?
You give me 1 satoshi to vote with, i vote with 100 satoshis on my desired option.

Well ... right now the standard client does not allow to use certain addresses to do certain transactions but it is possible. The idea is to distribute ... for example 7 billion tokens to 7 billion people in the world. now as those people have those satoshis associated with their private keys, they can send them on to certain addresses. To find the result of the poll you would track the bitcoins on them back to the distributor and ignore any bitcoins that did not go through the initiator's wallet.

[SgtSpike]

What would stop a person from acquiring many of said ballots to vote with?

With all of these voting mechanisms you'd need an authority that initially confirmed your identity, your right to vote and that you didn't sign up for this process before.

There is no magical cryptographic process that would be able to find out who is allowed to vote. If you mean, what is stopping people from selling their vote (their private key), then I guess the answer is probably: nothing.

But what would stop the authority from rigging the process?

What would stop a person from acquiring many of said ballots to vote with?

Each vote must be tied to a voting precinct (or other localized unit of voting) in order to be counted.  This unit would be responsible for validating the identity of voters and distributing ballots to voters.

Each ballot would only be valid when a voting precinct issued a cryptographically signed statement publishing which ballots it had available to issue.

It could still be abused by the voting precinct.  They could just issue the unclaimed ballots to themselves, or to the highest bidder.

pay one satoshi to each of your voters
set up a voting address for each option

hey, cool, bitcoin is a voting machine

What prevents me from voting with any x number of more satoshi's of my own?
You give me 1 satoshi to vote with, i vote with 100 satoshis on my desired option.

Well ... right now the standard client does not allow to use certain addresses to do certain transactions but it is possible. The idea is to distribute ... for example 7 billion tokens to 7 billion people in the world. now as those people have those satoshis associated with their private keys, they can send them on to certain addresses. To find the result of the poll you would track the bitcoins on them back to the distributor and ignore any bitcoins that did not go through the initiator's wallet.

What would stop me from getting multiple accounts so that I could claim multiple tokens and vote multiple times?

I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

The kind of idea I envisioned is if a private provider produced the entire run of ballots, which worked like lottery tickets.  They had private keys (or pre-signed cryptographic messages) on them, and votes are cast simply by revealing a scratchoff and publishing the message underneath (e.g. it's a QR code that gets scanned).  A vote is void if more than one competing message for the same candidacy is published.

Now, we would have to trust the ballot provider.  But suppose each time somebody voted, they rolled two dice, and double sixes meant their ballot should be submitted for audit.  By this, I mean all keys would be revealed and published and the integrity of the ballot verified... then the voter gets a replacement ballot.  This would mean on average, 1 in 36 ballots would be sacrificed for integrity checks.  Slightly under 3% of the ballots would be subject to audit, but even such a small percentage would make it statistically impossible to rig them.

Then I would double scratch all my opponents votes so they would get thrown out during an audit.

Haha, win. 

[giszmo]

pay one satoshi to each of your voters
set up a voting address for each option

hey, cool, bitcoin is a voting machine

What prevents me from voting with any x number of more satoshi's of my own?
You give me 1 satoshi to vote with, i vote with 100 satoshis on my desired option.

Well ... right now the standard client does not allow to use certain addresses to do certain transactions but it is possible. The idea is to distribute ... for example 7 billion tokens to 7 billion people in the world. now as those people have those satoshis associated with their private keys, they can send them on to certain addresses. To find the result of the poll you would track the bitcoins on them back to the distributor and ignore any bitcoins that did not go through the initiator's wallet.

What would stop me from getting multiple accounts so that I could claim multiple tokens and vote multiple times?

I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

If you see my original post, you know I am *not* pro such a or any voting machine.

[paraipan]

and if we use a mining pool for every candidate party ?

the miners would vote with hashing power. Opening a web page with an included cpu miner and a drop-down menu where the person could choose the party would solve the voting for non-miners too. All this process could be done in a 24 hours time frame, or more, to have a reasonable view on the public opinion.