
Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election - grdeken
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/sierra-leone-just-ran-the-first-blockchain-based-election/
======
KMag
I cautiously applaud the progress.

Back in Ron Rivest's 6.857 computer security class, we spent some time on
electronic voting. If you're not careful to get the privacy right, you open up
more opportunities for coercion.

With anonymous paper ballots, coercion can and does happen, but it basically
requires physical control of the polling station / voting booth to pull off.

In this case, anonymized ballots are put on a blockchain. Hopefully the system
is auditable, but provides no way for someone to prove which anonymized ballot
serial number belongs to them. Otherwise, the thugs can come to your house and
either beat you or pay you your bribe after forcing you to reveal how you
voted.

~~~
craftyguy
How do you provide anonymized ballots while at the same time guaranteeing that
fraudulant voting is not taking place? It seems that being able to verify that
a ballot came from an actual person authorized to vote (and not some bot) is
key, but I'm not sure how to satisfy both.

~~~
jinpan
Rivest invented the 3-ballot voting protocol (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot))

The trick to the 3-ballot voting protocol is that not everyone can validate
their vote. However, when a group of voters band together, they should be able
to validate that a subset of their votes (1/3) were registered with high
probability.

With a sufficiently large group of voters checking results, the law of large
numbers comes into play and they can statistically detect the presence of
voting fraud.

~~~
googlryas
I like how the example ballot on that wikipedia page has Alex Jones running
for president.

~~~
fareesh
One can dream

------
apo
_“Anonymized votes /ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which
will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and
validate,” said Gammar._

The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future
tense to describe access is worrying.

"Blockchain Technology" has attracted scoundrels of every stripe. If Agora
really cares about this as a test case, it needs to make the voting records
public, and articles like this one need to make it clear how the reader can
examine the results.

That said, I'm very skeptical about the utility of "Blockchain Technology" in
voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud
detectable?

In Bitcoin, the answer is crystal clear: Proof-of-Work coupled to an economic
incentive. This system has well-known scope and limitations. We can reason,
mathematically, about a multitude of attacks and outcomes.

Not so with the Agora system. And I'm afraid that journalists consistently
refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.

~~~
jfroma
What I don't understand about this is that even if it is mathematically and
technologically perfect (which I assume will be really hard) how can non-
technical people understand something so complex.

I am a software developer and to be honest I don't fully understand bitcoin
and blockchains.

Then my next question will be how can I trust something that I don't
understand.

Maybe as a counter-argument someone will say how people uses online banking
without fully understanding software, internet, etc. But I think is a
completely different problem with different challenges.

~~~
adamsea
Regulatory bodies, an engaged community of experts to provide scrutiny and
reach out to journalists when there are problems.

Like with cars, planes, and online banking, the key determinant is that
nontechnical people have a _sufficient_ degree of trust in _someone_else_, who
does have the appropriate expertise, to provide oversight.

I have no idea if Agora is good or not, or if blockchain-based voting is
viable. I'm just saying that there are demonstrated cases (and certainly also
other demonstrated failures) in which nontechnical people trust experts and
trust organizations to provide a sufficient degree of oversight.

In a sense, you could say that a classroom, or a democracy, is like this too.

~~~
ianai
Voting is one area where people do not and definitely should not trust some
“expert group” to authenticate their choices as a black box. The process needs
to be simple enough to be easily reconstructed.

------
iokevins
They used Agora:

[https://agora.vote/](https://agora.vote/)

(Aside: forgot to turn off my extension and so it appeared as, 'Sierra Leone
just ran the first "Multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet"-based
election')

[https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-
spreadsheet](https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-spreadsheet)

~~~
geofft
Well, it's a reasonable translation - what precisely makes this vote a
"blockchain" and not just a giant Excel spreadsheet?

There's no double-spend problem. There's a correct way to merge two ballots
cast by the same private key: discard them both. Since all operations are
mergeable in an arbitrary order, there's no need for proof-of-work or anything
like that to determine which chain is the "correct" chain - any pile of
ballots that contains all valid ballots is correct, and any partial pile can
get the remaining ballots appended at the end.

From the whitepaper it looks like they're running their own "skipchain," which
they refer to as a form of blockchain, but looks to me like a cross between a
Merkle tree and a skip list with _no_ proof-of-work mechanism. (It seems like
a genuinely useful / novel data structure, I just wouldn't call it a
blockchain.) And they're running some sort of proof-of-work consensus to gate
additions onto this skipchain, and periodically storing the state of the
skipchain in the Bitcoin blockchain.

I don't really understand why the latter two parts are necessary: the record
of ballots should be self-authenticating, and it should be easy to tell if
someone has removed a ballot, right? Is the idea that people are not likely to
watch the skipchain a la CT log monitors, so they want to use Bitcoin because
people already watch that?

On the one hand, they appear to have real cryptographers nad real research
behind this. On the other, saying "blockchain" seems like a great way for
someone running an unfair election to make it appear more legitimate....

~~~
zepolen
> There's a correct way to merge two ballots cast by the same private key:
> discard them both

What about the scenario where someone puts a gun to your head and forces you
to vote for them - and you can't change your vote at a later period?

~~~
tantanel
In Estonia they allow you to vote multiple times and only the latest vote
counts. They even allow you to then go and vote in the booth which renders
your e-vote invalid. I don’t know the internals of how they store the votes
but I can’t think of a way to do this without the side effect of knowing who
voted for whom.

~~~
toast0
If you do this with two systems, the e-vote could be encrypted to the second
system, but submitted to the first system. During voting hours, the first
system would collect the votes and apply the latest value wins rules. Then,
once voting is complete, it sends the votes (without envelope information) to
the second system to tally. In order to know who voted for whom, you need
collusion between the systems.

------
sannee
Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand
just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler
doesn't seem all that great.

The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future",
yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a
negligible part of the population understands.

~~~
icelancer
Plenty of idiots use an ATM and work with the financial system and all of its
quirks without much issue, why would a blockchain-based system be any
different?

~~~
sannee
It's not about using the system as an "user". It's about the fact that it
bases democracy on principles which are way beyond the mathematical
capabilities of 99%+ of the electorate!

I mean, if my government decides to use some crypto/blockhain magic, there is
no way I can figure out if using hash algorithm H in a method X is valid
choice or if it is a backdoor/negligence.

This is an issue which simply does not happen with paper ballots (backdooring
these is of course possible, but really expensive especially at scale). The
attack surface is easy to reason out, unlike with cryptography.

Maybe it does not matter though (and maybe I am afraid of mathematicians
secretly taking over the world, ha!)

~~~
dwighttk
I think it matters

------
utnick
by 'blockchain-based' they mean, a normal election happened with traditional
voting, and then some of the vote counters uploaded the tally of the votes
they counted to a private blockchain

~~~
thatf
any quotes?

~~~
QML
"The process, which aimed to prevent voter fraud in Sierra Leone, was powered
by Agora, a blockchain voting solutions provider. The company used a
permissioned blockchain to ensure that recorded data remained protected while
also being transparent to the stakeholders, all of whom were given permitted
access to the blockchain in order to tally the votes.

During the process, initial votes that are recorded on ballot papers are to be
counted by neutral observers. The procedure, being watched by Agora, is the
key step to entering that data on to the blockchain."

[https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-
election...](https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-
powered-by-blockchain-voting/)

~~~
fjsolwmv
How is block chain used, besides as a buzzword?

~~~
jacques_chester
It isn't.

You'll note that they carefully failed to disabuse anyone of the notion that
the entire thing took place online.

------
amitbr
In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be
performed by any member of a group of users that each have keys. Therefore, a
message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular
group of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it
should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the group members'
keys was used to produce the signature. Ring signatures are similar to group
signatures but differ in two key ways: first, there is no way to revoke the
anonymity of an individual signature, and second, any group of users can be
used as a group without additional setup. Ring signatures were invented by Ron
Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman, and introduced at ASIACRYPT in 2001.[1]
The name, ring signature, comes from the ring-like structure of the signature
algorithm.

Linkable ring signatures [4] The property of linkability allows one to
determine whether any two signatures have been produced by the same member
(under the same private key). The identity of the signer is nevertheless
preserved. One of the possible applications can be an offline e-cash system.
[link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature)]

~~~
Kliment
Linkable ring signatures are problematic because if someone can coerce you
into signing a second message then they can identify who you voted for.

------
noballot
If it's just electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private
company, the system is as vulnerable as any other e-voting system.

If we were to properly distribute the process by running a public key database
and giving each citizen a private key by which to sign a message in the
blockchain casting their vote, it introduces a new and far more insidious
problem: the system now provides a receipt for each vote that a malicious
actor could use to reliably buy votes on a massive scale with complete
automation: visit a website, use your private key to prove you voted for their
candidate, receive a bitcoin payout.

~~~
specialist
_"... electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private
company..."_

This is the second biggest threat to elections. And probably the most timely.

\--

My tour of duty as an election integrity activist radically changed my
worldview on these things. I previously thought the gear was the biggest
problem.

Now I know that the biggest threat is disruption. While well intentioned, HAVA
caused a lot of disruption. Resulting in no one knows what the rules are.
Ditto the continuous ongoing "reforms". Like changes in voter ID laws, rules,
procedures. Moving poll sites. Etc. Any changes that must be made should be
done incrementally, methodically.

The second biggest threat is the privatization of our election administration.
Like you observe. No private entity any where should be responsible for
verifying eligibility, issuing ballots, counting votes. Election
administration is the most fundamental function a democratic government
performs, its prime responsibility. It must be performed by citizens working
for the government to have any legitimacy whatsoever.

The third biggest threat to our elections is our form of voting. The USA's
FPTP (winner takes all) elections are very brittle, intolerant of the
inevitable margin of error. Much better, for both democracy and election
administration, would be to use Approval Voting and Proportional
Representation.

Yes, I still believe the gear we continue to use remains a big open untreated
wound.

------
piotrkaminski
> thereby offering instant access to the election results.

...

> it is still unclear who won

~~~
darawk
Only 70% of the votes were using this system.

~~~
kijin
Even when only 70% of the votes are counted, it should be pretty clear who got
more votes than another. The problem in this case is that no candidate got a
majority, so the top two will need to have a run-off election.

------
Twisell
This has really gone to far. What’s next?

Some dictator will run the first blockchain-based death sentence via a
distributed big data popular jury to guarantee a fair and auditable trial?

PS : forgot to mention this was a cloud based, severless solution developed by
a scrum agile team while pair programming in a 6th generation language for
extra scalability and safety.

------
m3kw9
I hope people there don’t automatically imply trust everytime they hear
blockchain. If controlled by central authorities the blocks can be changed
like text on a file.

------
finchisko
I miss details here.

1\. Can it be said that the election was electronic? If so, why is the
headline saying they used blockchain and not elections was first time
electronic. (I consider blockchain here only as implementation detail).

2\. Could voters vote from home over wire or they had to come to some kind of
booth that had electronic voting device in it?

~~~
c12
It can be said that the election was electronic, however other countries have
used electronic polling stations (notably the USA) and those have since been
proven to be easily hacked and the results modified.

The headline here stating the use of blockchain is important because its the
first election on the planet that has used the implementation and its an
implementation that can't be modified without trace.

As for point two I have no idea, I am assuming it required people using voting
booths but given the technology used, nothing is stopping it from allowing
decentralized voting.

 __edit: __As it turns out it looks as though people voted using traditional
paper ballets and it was inputted into the block chain via a neutral third
party:[https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-
election...](https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-
powered-by-blockchain-voting/)

------
thatf
Found no description of how exactly people vote with Agora
[https://agora.vote/](https://agora.vote/): do they come to a place and press
a button or do they download an app(or go to a web page) and press a button?

Either way, I can't see how fraud is prevented even with a blockchain in
place.

------
iafrikan
Correction: Aroga, Swiss company, used blockchain to tally and track election
results.

Older thread below.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872)

------
GenericsMotors
"blockchain-based election" is a bit of a stretch. A third party recorded part
of the election results using a blockchain. The election itself was still a
paper ballot.

Perhaps if the company had used Postgres to store the results there would have
been an article called "Sierra Leone just ran the first RDBMS-based election"?
Probably not, since relational DBs are not buzzword material.

------
iamgopal
In future, anybody with sufficient support can propose any change in legal
system and have it backed up directly by individuals instead of elite
parliamentary class. Will that happen ? That can remove whole election
criteria.

~~~
Synaesthesia
There’s nothing technical preventing this today, or anytime before. What’s
been lacking is the political will and the class consciousness to implement
it.

------
tardo99
Can someone explain to me how this works? Who are the miners? Where is the
competition to mine blocks? How is the system distributed such that one entity
can't back-propagate fabricated blocks into the chain?

~~~
Joool
In their whitepaper [1] they mention storing cryptographic proofs on the
Bitcoin blockchain (Section 3). However they do not seem to specify what
proofs exactly.

[1]
[https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf](https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf)

------
sly010
"Agora relies on voting administrators to select an identity management system
and provide a mechanism to authenticate voters. At the same time, Agora
intends to work with digital identity providers to provide governments and
institutions with digital identity solutions compatible with Agora’s voting
system. We will place an emphasis on investigating solutions compatible with
the latest advances in digital identity technology, notably decentralized and
sovereign identity solutions such as uPort [48] and Civic. [57]"

Does this basically mean authentication is centralized?

~~~
luckycharms810
I would imagine the best you can do here is a quorum of centralized
authentication services.

------
nimrod0
Paper describing the Agora network:
[https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf](https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf)

------
mozumder
So, this is a great way for a major states to actually brute-force hack
elections: have several millions of computers do proof-of-work for false
ballot data.

------
ineiti
They did use our permissioned skipchain available on:
[https://github.com/dedis/cothority](https://github.com/dedis/cothority) and
ran some nodes on a server.

Instead of burning 200kWh for one transaction, a voting consensus system is
enough.

BTW, there is also an e voting system in that repo, using neff shuffles.

------
juanmirocks
I am positive about this first step. Looking forward to seeing more of this in
for example (or rather specifically) Switzerland.

------
bogomipz
Can anyone comment on specifics of how the Agora system used here work in
practical terms? For instance do ballots have a QR code? How are the entered
into the ledger at polling stations, etc?

I'm happy to see articles on the practical benefits of blockchains. I feel
like they been drowned out by the media hysteria of cryptocurrencies lately.

------
bdamm
Blockchain-based elections seemed inevitable but I never saw it coming from a
national election proxy-ballot first. I thought maybe stockholders at an AGM
for a blue-chip company would be the first large-scale example.

------
headmelted
I've got a question I didn't see answered in the article.

Is the ledger hidden until the end of the election or publicly visible
throughout?

I only ask as it's a subtle technical difference that could massively
influence the outcome.

------
dorianm
I would rather have a Delegative Democracy (that I'm implementing in the
Points Project: [https://pointsproject.org](https://pointsproject.org))

------
John_KZ
Blockchain provides no advantage over other technologies in elections.

------
tzs
How does it compare to Scantegrity [1]?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity)

------
ajhurliman
Since this was just a proof of concept, I'd love to see the blockchain results
compared to the actual results.

------
zabil
Does anyone know if this decentralized with miners rewarded with coins to keep
the nodes and network running?

------
AlexCoventry
I'm glad to see they've backed away from doing an ICO token for now. That was
sketchy as hell.

------
mtgx
> His chosen successor, Samura Kamara, is being challenged by 15 other
> candidates

> Experts say a presidential run-off is likely as a first-round win would
> require one candidate taking 55% of the vote.

When even Sierra Leone has a more democratic voting system than Freedom Land™
(and I'm not talking about blockchains).

------
braptor
Good effort for trying, at least we have some potential even if it fails.

------
meganibla
Confirmation for the perspective that Africa is cyberpunk

------
colordrops
This is an amazing milestone, and a stake in the heart of the idea that
blockchain tech is no different than "tulip bulbs".

~~~
lukeqsee
I don’t think anyone is saying blockchain tech is “tulip bulbs”. The concern
is Bitcoin (an instance of blockchain tech), et al., are not all the
proponents claim them to be.

I’m convinced the blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin? Not so much.

~~~
wpietri
Personally, I'm saying _Bitcoin_ is tulip bulbs (or, in Sarah Jeong's
excellent phrase, "math Beanie Babies").

The _blockchain_ , on the other hand, I think is more like XML/XSLT: a really
interesting technology that has almost no real-world use that couldn't be done
more easily with some other technology. And that 15-20 years after its
popularity will be similarly obscure.

I've been looking for years, but, digital speculative pseudo-commodities
aside, I still have not found an in-production, value-delivering use of
blockchain technology that couldn't be done as well or better with some more
well understood technology.

~~~
quickthrower2
XSLT is one of those things where an XSLT ninja can be super productive in
transforming XML and do things much quicker than the coder using a general
purpose language. But most of us don't use XSLT enough to get that good, so
for most of us XSLT is harder than just coding something.

~~~
mikekchar
Kind of off topic, but just want to chip in to say that XSLT is awesome. The
average programmer can learn it quite quickly. For me, the "killer
application" for XSLT is screen scraping HTML. If you want to aggregate data
that is spread across a whole bunch of websites, it absolutely rocks. It is
especially good if your organisation uses a SaaS that doesn't give you access
to an API. Even if you have an API, it is often an order of magnitude easier
to do what you need to do in XSLT. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to
generate burn down charts for Trello for a long time now...

~~~
wpietri
I'm not denying that XSLT is a neat technology.

But for those who don't know the history, the vision was that XML would be
this amazing interchange technology, and XSLT would be used to transform the
XML as needed between and within apps, without needing real programmers.

For example, I know of one top-10 website circa 2004 that had their Java
programmers producing only XML output. Then, XSLT specialists would transform
that into HTML for rendering.

In theory, this provided a clear separation between back-end and front-end
programmers. In practice, it was a giant clusterfuck, because any real work
required coordinated changes at multiple levels. Although in theory the front-
end work was independent, the reality was absurdly convoluted XSLT trying to
turn not-very-good XML into something that rendered well on screen. Nobody
sensible does this today.

At the time, XML/XSLT was expected to be central to a new, better way of
making software. But now it's a weird niche thing, because although it was
technologically cool, it was not actually better for 99% of use cases.

~~~
mikekchar
I just noticed your reply now. That's really interesting, because I don't
think that this was ever what XSLT was for. However, now that you mention it,
the company I was working for thought the exact same thing. I thought it was
just they who were crazy. I guess the idea was more wide spread than I
realised.

FWIW, there was a time when many people (embarrassingly, even myself) who
thought that XML was a good way to represent data in a language agnostic way
(these days, JSON fills that void -- there are even people trying to recreate
SOAP and CORBA with JSON ;-) ). I won't go into the details of that, but even
now I can probably make a pretty convincing argument that it's a good idea
(which is why people are trying to recreate SOAP and CORBA with JSON ;-) ).
But the point is that once you have data in XML, it's kind of a PITA to parse
it (well, JSON is slightly better off there). If I just want a subset of the
data, or I want to take bits of it and insert it into a different XML data set
it's quite a lot of code to write. XSLT was for that.

But where we agree is that XML is _not_ a great way to represent data (and,
jokes aside, while JSON is _much_ better it's also being overused). So without
XML, there is no need for XSLT. But given that HTML can often be parsed as
XML, it's still really useful for its intended purpose: to extract and
transform data.

------
retox
DO NOT ACCEPT ANY DIGITAL ONLY VOTING SYSTEM.

UNLESS THERE IS A WAY TO PHYSICALLY AUDIT THE SYSTEM, AND ESPECIALLY YOUR OWN
VOTE, ALL SUCH VOTES SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.

DIGITAL ONLY VOTING IS A FORM OF VOTER SUPPRESSION AND CANNOT BE CONSIDERED
LEGITIMATE.

~~~
sjapkee
If you can't count all of the votes either phisycal or digital, you can't be
sure that voting isn't compromised. So, you can never be sure.

------
beiller
I think this is really cool. A trendy buzzword tech may bring more people to
the polls, and the unforgable blockchain technology seems to have a use case
here. I wonder how they prevent people from making multiple accounts. The fact
that generally I find block chains slow, doesn't negatively affect this type
of system. Great!

------
dschuetz
I don't think that decentralized voting is a good thing at all. Voting will
lose its significance when a vote can be issued with barely more than just a
click. Elections and votes will become increasingly meaningless and much more
frequent.

Social interaction suffers greatly today, because of the success of Social
Media, which was praised as a new and easy way to socially interact without
going outside.

Blockchain might be the right choice of technology for the voting process,
people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in
person!

~~~
juliendorra
The Swiss have very frequent votes, with direct votes on several issues 3 or 4
times a year. That’s in addition to electing representatives. Of course they
are the oldest continuous modern democracy.

You could argue from the Swiss example that more voting occasions wouldn’t
change the main issues of modern democracies, but it doesn’t seems to lower
the importance of voting either, with a similar turn out that elsewhere.

(Also, a technical solution to constant voting and flexible, transferable
delegation of voting power is the main goal of the fluid democracy movement.)

~~~
bjelkeman-again
The Swiss have a relatively low turnout for their voting. 47%
[http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/](http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/)

It seems people only vote on what they care about. Which I think can be
expected if there are many votes. [https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-
sometimes-_most-swiss...](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-sometimes-
_most-swiss-do-actually-vote/41963568)

