
A Peer to Peer Voting Algorithm [pdf] - xorxorxorxor
http://vixra.org/pdf/1905.0239v1.pdf
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narnianal
Scrolling through the posts I haven't seen any non-democracy focussed post. So
let me add other options for digital voting that might be important:

Shareholders voting for trust of the board (not sure how to say this in
English). These votes are usually influenced by who owns how much stock, so
it's less about democracy and more about showing publicly that you have the
support of the most influential stake holders.

Instead of an open source maintainer making a biased single-person decision
how two branches should be merged or how a merge conflict should be resolved
it could be done via voting.

Wether a transaction is accepted or not is voted on my distributed ledger
participants, wether they know it or not. The moment you put your block on top
of what you perceive as the ledgers top you vote for that previous block to be
accepted.

Which picture is funny enough to get onto the front page of 9gag is voted on
by the viewers.

Given incomplete data and a very short time till death doctors need to make
decisions which procedure to apply to an emergency patient. This could be
voted on given how many talents could be connected to a case in an instant
digitally.

Which players should be matched together for a new round of Dota could be
voted on digitally instead of leaving that completely to a digital choice
algorithm.

It could be a way to lead humans and AI into a cooperative work environment.
Having a few differently trained AIs and experts voting on which path to take
with the business for instance.

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toolslive
Here's a technical overview of the topic. It's not a trivial problem at all.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e734/d63888d81075efa0402599...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e734/d63888d81075efa0402599ae4e43772cf2e7.pdf)

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ergl
From the intro:

> Elections hold a vulnerability that can bring democracies to a halt. [This
> vulnerability] makes it possible for people to elect a malicious authority
> that will later refuse to organize future elections.

> This paper is […] aimed to tackle this problem from a cryptographic point of
> view. […] The algorithm still requires authorities to inscribe voters.

This sounds pretty useless. First, it requires an _already_ honest authority
to register people in the system before any elections can take place. In
addition, this authority needs to be trusted _forever_, as it needs to add
more people to the system as they are born.

Even if this problem was solved, this paper doesn't even question what power
means. If a ruling authority already has the power to stop regular elections
from happening, it also has the power to ignore any results that come out of
this scheme, to pressure people to not vote through new laws or force, and to
imprison anyone who does.

An example (and this applies irrespectively of what opinions you hold about
it): in Spain, a referendum was convoked to decide about the independence of
the region of Catalonia. The government declared this referendum
unconstitutional, although it still took place. People voted for independence
and won. Still, the results were void, and the people who convoked the
referendum are now sitting in court, charged with rebellion. Does it really
matter if this referendum was held using physical ballots and boxes, or using
digital signatures? You can't remove a central authority just by pretending it
doesn't exist.

~~~
pessimizer
There's a liberal/whig/enlightenment core belief that force can be reasoned
out of existence through a sufficient amount of research and debate. That
asking the soldier "Why are you pointing the gun at me, your brother, for the
proven-corrupt king?" will turn the gun into a flower. That believing hard
enough will bring tinkerbell back to life.

~~~
rijoja
Still things have gotten a lot less bloody over the last 500-years or so?

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DennisP
Regardless of whether this should be used to elect politicians, it appears to
be a pretty interesting technical achievement. As far as I know, counting
votes in public without a central authority, while also not revealing the
individual ballots, has not been accomplished before.

But the code appears to be missing from the pdf and the links at the end. Has
it been removed, or will it be posted later?

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Buetol
For something as important as an election, it should be simple enough for
people to understand the process and believe in the result.

Another solution to adding more trust into the elections: People could be able
to annotate their physical ballot with a token, each vote with each token is
then published and people can see for themselves that their vote has been
taken into account.

~~~
Nursie
This seems to be a favourite topic for people here - make votes able to be
checked by voters.

I've seen many proposed implementations but they all fail because if I can
prove my vote to myself in any way, someone else can make me prove it to them
either to buy or coerce my ballot.

~~~
hjk05
Not necessarily. You could provide people with a 4 digit code they can use
alongside their id to verify that their vote was counted as they intended, but
also give them access to a tool that allows them to receive a code that
“proves” their vote was counted for any arbitrary party. That way you can
verify you own code because you know the real reference code, but anyone else
can’t rely on your vote truthfully being anything beyond them trusting you,
which is already the case for the current system.

~~~
Nursie
Not sure I'm seeing the 'proof' there. By what mechanism do these two codes
prove anything much?

If the 'real' code shows one thing and the 'fake' codes another what assurance
do you have that the counting was done with your 'real' code and the voting
machine didn't put another one in there?

~~~
aeternus
Here's one way to do it that requires basically zero trust in the software:

1) When voters enter the booth, they throw a large number of multi-sided dice.

2) The resultant throw is scanned via computer-vision. Voter verifies it is
correct, and it becomes the voter's ID. Voter votes normally and the vote is
recorded alongside that generated "ID".

3) The voter receives a print-out that contains their (ID, vote), however it
is randomly shuffled in among other real (ID, vote) pairs. The print-out is
guaranteed to have at least one vote for each candidate.

4) The entire list of (ID, vote) pairs can be published nationally. Everyone
can verify that the right number of votes were counted, and that their vote
was accurately counted since they can find both their ID and vote in the
national list.

They can show their receipt to others but cannot prove which one of the many
IDs on the receipt was actually theirs.

~~~
Nursie
OK, OK, thankyou!

I can see that working, particularly part 3 there being key.

Seriously I've been asking for years and this is the first time anyone's
actually spelled out a scheme that allows the person to go back and prove the
vote to themselves and have genuine plausible deniability to others who may
seek to coerce them. Thanks :)

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ganzuul
This paper doesn't address the first step; but takes issuing of public key
cryptography as fiat. If we can solve this first problem the consequence
ranges far beyond democracy.

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mostafab
Interesting, I think it can be applied to the current political crisis in
Algeria [https://medium.com/hirak-tech/alg%C3%A9rie-comment-faire-
soi...](https://medium.com/hirak-tech/alg%C3%A9rie-comment-faire-
soi-m%C3%AAme-son-projet-de-transition-7bca9e907348)

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samstave
One thing i was thinking about yesterday: apply Netflix’s interactivity
functionality from Bandersnatch to political debates and rallys such that
viewers can make choices and answer polls and vote in real time as they watch
a debate or townhall or anything like that.

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vijaybritto
This is very interesting to me since I'm actively watching elections being
stolen by the central govt in India. This is an amazing idea. It would be
causing a great amount of debate when I introduce this in my friends group!!!

~~~
srean
Could tell more on election stealing in India. There were some allegations
about the correctness of EVMs. Is there any thing more substantive than that.

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jakobov
There is a more simple way to do basically the same thing:

See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19137493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19137493)

~~~
nickodell
I don't think your solution works.

Suppose N=20. Imagine the server and 19 of the voters are compromised, and are
trying to de-anonymize your vote. It "randomly" creates a group composed of
you and 19 voters that are collaborating with the server to de-anonymize your
vote.

Assuming that the server has M collaborators, it can discover the votes of M /
(N - 1) of the citizens.

