Source
r/opensource•
OriginalSimba

Is anyone working on an open source internet-voting application?

It's almost 2020 and politics sucks. You know what would be great? real democracy. The problem is it's impossible to achieve with pens and paper. Enter the Internet.

Democracy is not in the interest of the empowered elites of any nation, so they aren't going to make this happen, but we can.

Does anyone know of existing open source project(s) to build a program capable of utilizing the internet for national and state elections?

My thoughts on the subject:

We need to satisfy the following challenges:

  1. Security, Identity verification, probably key-pair based, and prevention of fraud.
  2. Verifiability, a preferably rapid solution to "recounts". Distributed logging for verification of results. Being a public interest effort, the distributed log could be available to all interested citizens, similar to Bitcoin's "Blockchain".
  3. Low-cost, should use existing infrastructure. Be web-based, and possible to access and vote from public terminals such as libraries.

The application doesn't need to necessarily handle weighing of votes, that stuff could be kept to election policymakers, this way the application could evolve and improve and continue to serve democratic nations of many different electoral models.

Building it should be simple, and utilizing techniques similar to that "Blockchain" craze, it should be possible to do it securely, certainly more securely and accurately than the 1800s systems we use presently. Keeping it free and open should be priority number one.

Posted Jul 18, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC · edited

013
toddthegeek•

I feel that you should watch this before investing too much time into the project:
https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI

10
OriginalSimbaOP•

Nah.

  1. Anonymity: It's a nice idea, but first, you don't have it. Google and Facebook and a lot of others they all know who you're going to vote for, EVEN IF YOU DONT TELL ANYONE. But be honest, you probably tell everyone. Yes, anonymity matters, but you don't have it now, you don't care now, and votes being counted matters more. If you say you care more about anonymity than your vote being counted, right now, then you're lying.
  2. "There are three ways" Liar. He dictates the scenario then tells you why it doesn't work. But the scenario he describes is not the only one.
  3. The central count program, again, he dictates limitations that don't exist. We're talking about distributed, public, completely transparent results.

THE ENTIRE VIDEO that you linked to is a stream of lies and whore shit. Listen to how he uses subtext to create limitations that do not otherwise exist, so as to support his narrow-case arguments. These are signs of the exact people we want to tear down from power and destroy. Don't listen to his stupid crook opinions on voting machines, or anything else. He's identified himself as your would-be master.

Elections today are a pile of trash. Offer constructive solutions or nothing, I suggest.

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herbivorous-cyborg•

Anonymity

Without anonymity, someone can buy votes from others and be certain of whether those people actually voted the way they were paid to vote. With anonymous voting, buying votes doesn't occur because the buyer cannot verify what the voter does in a booth.

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OriginalSimbaOP•

With anonymous voting, buying votes doesn't occur because the buyer cannot verify what the voter does in a booth.

Lies. With anonymity they can just make up the entire election results. Because of the electoral college this is even more of a problem.

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Corporate_Drone31•

This is a difficult problem, with a lot of research done on this topic. That won't be easy to implement securely while preserving voter anonymity.

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OriginalSimbaOP•

I agree but see my comment above about anonymity.

It would be trivial to provide a certain amount of anonymity but at the end of the day if you want accurate, untampered voting results then you need a paper trail and where else can that paper trail lead but to the hands that mark the ballot.

We're hiding from ourselves. If our votes are truly in the best interest of our own nation then we should not need to be that terrified of having them revealed. This seems like a behavior standard that emerged from the days of slavery, when white men had to hide their real political agendas because they were no longer aligned with the larger society.

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Corporate_Drone31•

Unless the new electronic voting system is 100% zero-knowledge and anonymity is preserved while disallowing people from casting multiple votes, you will always be at risk.

Yes, we are hiding from ourselves, but there's a good reason for that. The current government doesn't punish voters for voting a particular way, so it would be safe to show who voted for which candidate, for the duration of the current gov. The risk comes from the fact that governments come and go, but keeping records across government transitions is very cheap (and once you have a running record-keeping system from the "good" government times, it's easy to keep it running in the upcoming "bad" government times).

Imagine you're a voter during the Cold War in Russia. Against all odds, a single party that pushes for democratic reform manages to get onto the ballots, and the government doesn't like that. Are you going to vote for it if the votes aren't anonymous? No, because you may find yourself suddenly unable to access better education or decent jobs, the government will keep a closer eye on you to check that you aren't turning into a dissident, and your children may get a black mark on their record simply because they are guilty of being associated with you. That, or you are scared that the government will come for you in the middle of the night and leave no trace you were ever there.

3
Doctor_Sportello•

It is a very bad idea, imo, to not use paper ballots for elections. I'm not sure why you are against them. Technology is not a panacea.

2
Bloopz38•

I dont know of any open source ones, but Estonia implemented internet voting some time ago as part of their e-citizenship. Could be a good starting point for research on the process of carrying something like this out. Security would be huge though as something with this much value would be a massive target to citizens and foreign entities alike.

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navyeod345•

I'd like to mention that it has been pointed out by experts that Estonian voting system has huge security risks, gaps and problems. So don't get your hopes up. Read the report: https://estoniaevoting.org/

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[deleted]•

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OriginalSimbaOP•

Security would be huge though as something with this much value would be a massive target to citizens and foreign entities alike.

That's true for a lot of sensitive infrastructure in today's America. Most of it remains secure most of the time, with a few exceptions we all heard about in recent years. If we focus and put our best minds to the task, and keep it 100% open source so that the public can contribute in testing the code, then I believe we could not only have the most secure, most accurate, most relevant elections ever held, but we could share our creation (again) with the rest of the world so everyone wins.

Nobody is going to do it for us. They're trying to control the world and they don't want this kind of change, because the old system of lies and election fraud and jerry mandering and so forth keeps all of them in power just fine. Either this society's developers decide to do it unilaterally, or suffer the oligarchy indefinitely. I prefer to do something. Time's a wastin'.

We've had electronic voting for years, but the problem is universally their proprietary nature.

People looking to profit from elections are not interested in the prosperity of the nation. We need a community project. We have these things for chat, email, file transfers, video chat, so many less important things. Let's get this ball rolling.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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herbivorous-cyborg•

This can be achieved partially, but there are some inherent limitations to digital voting. The limitation that held us back for awhile is that the server side processing cannot be trusted by the public. Who hosts the software that handles the server side processing and who has the authority to fully audit the hardware and software running in tandem with the voting software? This isn't something which can be achieved securely over a remote connection. Enter blockchain technology. Blockchain based voting software can overcome this limitation because the server side processing is done in a trustless fashion. However, then you have the issue of it being possible to buy someone's vote. With a paper ballot in a booth, nobody can confirm how you voted. If you can vote using a personal computing device, that opens the door to allow people to force others to reveal their vote in exchange for payment. This is the same vulnerability that is found in mail-in voting that is already used in some areas.

tl;dr - It can be achieved using something like the Ethereum blockchain (ie. voters receive a single ERC20 token each and can send it to a wallet address associated with their chosen candidate), but it wouldn't be quite as good of a solution compared to pen and paper in a booth.

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OriginalSimbaOP•

The limitation that held us back for awhile is that the server side processing cannot be trusted by the public.

This was addressed in my original post.

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