How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? That when they vote for X that the counter for X is increasing by 1? By verify I mean full understanding of the process without the need to believe somebody who calls themselves an "expert".
This is a tricky UX issue at the moment, but I'm sure this will be doable in time.
The nice thing about blockchains is that once transactions are finalized, the state is known, independently of whether or not the user was hacked. With zero-knowledge proofs, voters could theoretically verify that their "right to vote token" (as I've explained in another answer above) was used to cast a certain vote, without revealing their identity.
Now, if the software they're using is malicious, or their device is vulnerable, the election is screwed.
It's worth noting that Estonia manages digital elections quite nicely with their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system to ensure system integrity
> their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system
The arguments outlined above are really hard to follow, and doesn't really help the blockchain voting case.
Unless something exceptional happened recently, Estonian eID cards are just bog standard ISO 7810/7816 cards.
No blockchain or blockchain-like system involved. Just regular X.509 style PKI. They were even affected by the insecure proprietary RSAlib code a few years ago, like so many others, and all cards had to be replaced.
You're correct, I misphrased that somewhat. The government uses a blockchain (the Keyless-Serveless Infrastructure or KSI blockchain) to ensure data integrity in their government systems. As I understand, this is also used for their digital voting system.
> The Estonian Government started testing blockchain technology in 2008, as a response to 2007 cyber attacks and with an aim to mitigate possible insider threats. Estonia was the first nation state in the world to deploy blockchain technology in production systems - in 2012 with the Succession Registry kept by the Ministry of Justice.
> Which Estonian state agencies are utilising blockchain technology today?
> → Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications
It's not a UX issue, it's a logic issue. Voting has to count each vote exactly once, must be easily (!) verifiable at every step, and must be anonymous. Every blockchain systems violates at least one of those constrains, mostly the verifiable part.
Estonia is more or less unimportant on the global scale. There is very little incentive to manipulate an election from the outside.
Estonia is probably the most vulnerable country to election tampering in Europe aside from Belarus. Their entire internet and e-voting infrastructure was built up after the largest cyber-attack on a foreign nation, which came from Russia after Estonia removed a Soviet-era war memorial.
This attack also led to the NATO Cybersecurity Center of Excellence being based in Tallinn, and Estonian firms becoming leaders in cybersecurity consulting worldwide. The Estonian example is a splendid example of decentralization and self-sovereign identity done right. All medical records, civil data, banking information, is stored in a decentralized mesh called X-Road.
Finland and other Nordic countries are now adopting X-Road after Estonia's success with it.
If you wish to speak more about this, I'd be glad to, but you're wrong on all fronts. I don't want to regurgitate my blockchain arguments, but if you Ctrl-F this thread for "Right to Vote", you will find my contention about how verifiable, anonymous, and single-vote elections can be held on-chain.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of it. I still thing in-person paper-ballot voting is the most reasonable way to vote.
> How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted?
Volunteer to be a poll worker and to be one of the witnesses during the counting process. You can then watch every step of the process occur openly and see that the votes are being counted accurately.
If you watch the process accurately count all of the vote papers in the box at the end of the day, you can reasonably conclude that everyone's vote in that precinct was counted accurately.
If there are enough randomly selected volunteers, you can reasonably assume trust in their witness accounts together.
You don't need to volunteer there personally.
But wait... what if everyone assumes the volunteers are mostly ordinary citizens doing their civic duty? What if, in reality, anyone can apply to be a volunteer but the system systematically always chooses its own plants...?
And when you volunteer, as luck would have it they pick someone else "at random".
I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court)
- Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case.
- Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts.
- Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short.
- Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location)
- The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules.
- The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting.
- the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks)
- as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room
- the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard
- results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics
- all the results, down the voting district level are available online
- I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website
- it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not
- there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public
This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people.
TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
In the US there is no standard way of voting. Elections are run by each of the 54 states and territories. Each one of those have varying standards. Within most states the state itself provides certain rules that must be followed but the election is actually overseen by the local government and there may substancial leeway regarding how the locality implements the rules. Within each locality different polling places may use different technologies. I have even been to polling places where there were differing ways to vote within the same location. In general polling places are run by volunteers and each candidate is allowed to have representatives at the polling place.
