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Bitcoin Government Privacy Security The Military Politics

West Virginia Will Allow 'Blockchain Voting' In the 2020 Election (technologyreview.com) 89

Posted by BeauHD from the risky-ideas dept.
Military voters stationed overseas will be able to cast their votes for the 2020 presidential election via a mobile app that uses a private blockchain. MIT Technology Review reports: Donald Kersey, West Virginia's elections director, tells the cryto news website LongHash that he believes the app, created by a startup called Voatz, can enhance participation by overseas voters. Turnout among this group is very low, in part because the process of receiving a ballot and securely returning it on time is often not straightforward. This is the rationale behind the decision by a number of states to allow overseas military voters to return their ballots via e-mail. West Virginia apparently is of the mind that Voatz's private blockchain will make this kind of online voting more secure. The state first piloted the program during the 2018 midterms.

Though Kersey admits there's no telling for certain whether the app can be compromised, West Virginia is undeterred, especially given the "really good response rate" officials saw during the midterms last year. "We are not saying mobile voting is the best solution to the problem, we are not saying that blockchain technology is the best solution to storage of security data," Kersey tells LongHash. "What we are saying though is that it's better than what we have."
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West Virginia Will Allow 'Blockchain Voting' In the 2020 Election More

West Virginia Will Allow 'Blockchain Voting' In the 2020 Election

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  • Please let this madness end (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How does blockchain help with this problem, other than a marketing ploy?
    The blockchain...a solution in search of a problem.

    • It doesn't. Sure, it has a blockchain, but if it's the same vendor they used in 2018, the actual votes that count are emailed to the county clerk. Because what could go wrong.

    • How does blockchain help with this problem, other than a marketing ploy?
      The blockchain...a solution in search of a problem.

      It takes away the secret vote making it easier to buy votes.. That is what it does, and that is ALL it does.

    • Blockchain is a way for the majority to agree that someone else made a decision. Voting is probably the one thing that blockchain is good for. You don't need a government official to tell you who won the election; your blockchain will tell you.
      • But this is a private blockchain, aka it's 100% controlled by the vendor who thus can change the chain at will.

  • So what happened to all that voter fraud (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @10:16PM (#58462600)

    So after caterwauling nonstop for a nearly a decade about voter fraud in order to get Voter ID passed and early mail voting tightened as much as they could the state GOP suddenly doesn't think potential fraud is a problem. It is all those sweet sweet GOP votes from the military that makes the difference.

    I'm not saying that electronic voting can't be implemented with fairness and accountability. It can but I am not sure that WV's implementation will be. What I am pointing out is that the GOP's veto-proof legislative majority seems now completely unconcerned.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well, it should have a nice, publicly verifiable cryptographic output.

      Meanwhile, it's apparently racist to ask people voting for ID, so I want to dress like Boris and mumble in pseudo-Russian about colludingk with Moose and Sqvirrel to trigger the Democratic election judge in 2020 to see whether or not they'll stick to their "principles."

      • From the article: The blockchain can’t protect the information as it travels over the internet, and doesn’t guarantee that a user’s choices will be reflected accurately.

        So yes! Publicly verifiable output! ... of dubious veracity.

        And also, the company can pull a 51% attack with a mere 5 nodes: The company says that in a general election pilot, its system will use eight “verified validating nodes,” or computers (all controlled by the company) (emphasis mine)

        But at least no one

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by laird ( 2705 )

        Even without checking IDs, voting is effectively pretty secure. You have to go in person to a polling place, where everyone from the same neighborhood votes. Then you'd have to claim to be someone who's registered to vote at that polling location and hope nobody there knows that person, and hope that person hasn't already voted, because in either case you'd get caught trying to vote fraudulently, which is punishable by jail time. And if you're successful, you get ONE vote cast per person engaged in the plot

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Terwin ( 412356 )

          Even without checking IDs, voting is effectively pretty secure. You have to go in person to a polling place, where everyone from the same neighborhood votes. Then you'd have to claim to be someone who's registered to vote at that polling location and hope nobody there knows that person, and hope that person hasn't already voted, because in either case you'd get caught trying to vote fraudulently, which is punishable by jail time. And if you're successful, you get ONE vote cast per person engaged in the plot. So it's a very expensive, high-risk way to steal an election, which is why it basically never happens. Note that every time someone's claimed massive voter fraud in order to justify the "voter ID" laws, they've been unable to support their claims in court because claims in court need to be backed up by facts.

          If you want to steal an election, it's better to buy a voting machine vendor and get the ability to modify the reported vote written into their proprietary software. Then you can make a profit while stealing elections, at minimal risk because you only need a few people to steal as many votes as you like.

          Seriously? I can choose from any of more than a dozen poling locations serving a community of hundreds of thousands of residents.

          And if I do not have any form of ID, then I can still get a provisional ballot that will be counted so long as no one else voted using the name I gave.

          I will agree however that even using a bus full of multi-voters and a stack of registration cards(which have no picture in my county), is generally not the most effective approach to vote tampering, but more due to logistical diffi

        • Going to a polling station is good because it prevents other from influencing your vote like can happen with mail in voting.

          The problem with all paper voting isn't when the voting is being done. It's when the ballots are being transferred to be counted. This is a vulnerable time when they could be switched for another set of ballots pre-marked to go in a specific persons favour. If enough ballot boxes can be swapped then the outcome can be changed.

          I would have no problem with a system of either paper ballot

    • So after caterwauling nonstop for a nearly a decade about voter fraud in order to get Voter ID passed and early mail voting tightened as much as they could the state GOP suddenly doesn't think potential fraud is a problem

      Huh?

      The whole point of adopting Blockchain would be that they are hoping it's more secure. Being electronic, I have doubts in the whole system, but the ATTEMPT is one towards combating fraud - not against it.

      • So you give up anonymity in exchange for a more secure backhaul to the ballot box. It does reduce the number of people who can tamper with your vote, at the cost of proving to your chain of command how you voted. The senior officer ranks are political appointments, they likely have good reason to swing the vote to support who put them in their rank.
    • the GOP is going to use this to rig elections. It's really not a hard thing to imagine after what we saw in South Carolina. With racism on the wane and the Evangelicals declining in numbers the only thing they have left to stay in power is cheating. The GOP is very much the party of the oligarchy. There's some folks in the Democratic party, like Bernie and Warren, who support workers. There's no such animal in today's GOP. They're now an "ends justifies means" party with the ends doing the bidding of whoeve
      • Your post demonstrates exactly what is wrong with the voting public. You've been brainwashed by the liberal media to think that conservatism only survives because of Christianity and racism (and some of you don't even think there's a difference). Conservatism is about individual liberty, free market capitalism, and a government that doesn't regulate how many tissues you can use when you blow your nose. But you're still trapped in your own little safe space where identity politics are the only thing that m

    • state GOP suddenly doesn't think potential fraud is a problem

      What makes you think the state GOP knows anything at all about blockchain, fraud or the problems it presents?

      • What makes you think the state GOP knows anything at all about blockchain, fraud or the problems it presents?

        I think they know as much as they apparently do about voter fraud that would be stopped by Voter ID requirement.

        What the do know is that making it easier for overseas military to vote means they get an electoral advantage. Making it easier for less affluent people or people of color to vote is against them.

        It is not really complicated.

    • I'm not saying that electronic voting can't be implemented with fairness and accountability.

      Then I will. It CAN'T. It is mathematically impossible to perserve both secret and trustable voting, having both of these can only be approximated by putting in physical limitation such as requiring people to vote in certain verified locations.

  • Trump wins in West Virginia by 2 billion votes. Paper ballots will be scanned and uploaded to the commissioner's website in PDF format as soon as they can be printed from the block chain. All Gore was not available for comment.

  • This is a win-win (Score:5, Funny)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @10:39PM (#58462658)

    The best part about this scheme for West Virginia is that each vote will consume over 800 million kWh of electricity in order to compute the required hashes. With the ensuing increase in demand for coal to supply that power, WV is going to vote itself into prosperity.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Don't be silly. This is West Virginia. They don't need no fancy algorithm. Just a few Sha512 hashes will do.

      I joke about that, however there probably is a way to make a very secure way to ensure the integrity using sha512.

  • Poor West Virginia (Score:4, Informative)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday April 20, 2019 @12:10AM (#58462844) Journal

    Since we're talking about them and the 2020 election, did you know that poverty in West Virginia has gotten worse since Trump became president?

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/w... [cbsnews.com]

    There are also many fewer coal jobs in West Virginia since Trump was elected on a platform of putting coal miners back to work.

    https://www.wvpublic.org/post/... [wvpublic.org]

    Promises made, promises klept.

  • Multiple nodes are competing to update the ledger? How many of them? how many different companies/orgs are involved in the running of those (that would indicate competition)? Many different codebases are involved for the service, or just one depoyed in parallel to all those nodes? I've not been able to reach the execs at Voatz to get answers and I've tried.

  • The Voatz FAQ says "only recently-manufactured smartphone models from Apple, Samsung and Google are supported with Voatz." Are the demographics of owners of those phones different from the demographics of all eligible voters?

    "touches the fingerprint reader on the smartphone": what if the voter has a religious objection to fingerprinting (Kaite v. Altoona Student Transportation, 3:17-cv-5, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, 2017)?

    Or fingerprints are unreadable because of a recent c

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