Decentralized Electoral System [closed]

Question

So I have been thinking about this for only a couple of days, take this with a grain of salt.

I know that, in general, electronic voting is a bad idea for a number of reasons. But I think that there has to be a way of doing this safe and securely, maybe not though.

Lets try to imagine a decentralized voting system. Each individual, who has the right to vote, gets a public/private key pair (maybe there is a way of doing it so that only the government can generate those pairs, therefor ensuring that every vote is legal). Then we would have a block chain, where a block consists of a list of votes. A vote is just a public key tuple (and some signature), the first is casting their vote for the second. You would only be able to vote during a certain time period (every vote outside of this period gets discarded). The actual decentralization happens as soon as votes get counted, because now anyone in this system can count votes.

Now the main problem here is how do you get your vote into the block chain. Because if you use any electronic device connected to the internet, a man-in-the-middle attack might be possible (changing the vote before sending it out to the network). You might have to design a specific device solely for voting and make it open hardware/software but I don't know if that's not safe either.

In any case, what do you think of this idea? Do you think it could be theoretically done? Also, do you know if there have been similar suggested systems? I don't seem to find anything on this topic (except for electronic voting of course)

Answer 1

Selling votes

The number one problem with online voting is that it allows for the selling of votes. Assume that I want to buy your vote. We sit together at your terminal. You access your public/private key. I pay you $5 and cast your vote, signed with your key.

Or I don't pay you $5. I just hit you until you give me your key. The higher the price, the more likely this is.

Stealing votes

Now assume I am a spy for a foreign country. I get a job close to where the keys are generated and learn the system. I divert some keys from people who probably weren't going to vote to my own people. They cast the votes. Because I work for the government, which is the trusted agent, no one catches me doing this. And because it is electronic, I can do this for a large number of votes (in non-electronic cases, an agent might manage some of the votes in a single county, hardly worth it).

Safe voting

We know how to count votes safely. We don't need new tech. Each person goes to a polling place and gets a ballot. The person fills out the ballot at the polling place, verifies that it is machine readable, and drops it into a locked box. If the ballot is not machine readable, the person exchanges the ballot (which goes into a different box) for a fresh ballot.

That system is fully tested and works. Done right, voting and counting can be quick. It's fully auditable. Recounts are straightforward.

Absentee

The hardest kind of voting to verify is absentee. Because the person does not go to the polling place, we rely on things like the signature to verify the ballot's legitimacy.