As I write this article, the entire United States is holding its breath, waiting for the results of the 2020 election. Although former Vice President Joe Biden was elected — but there was an obvious objection — I can’t know if my votes were counted or if it was judged “unjust” and rejected. This is very important.
Last week, there were reports of voters being intimidated, polling stations closed, fear of vote failure and delay, and allegations of voter fraud abound. The ravages of COVID-19 have promoted an unprecedented method of mail voting. Although this method is relatively safe, the infrastructure it relies on has insufficient funds and the spread is very narrow. These problems are based on the usual low voter turnout and voter suppression tradition in the United States.
The chaos surrounding the 2020 election has exposed cracks in American democracy. Although this uncertainty is largely due to larger social and political issues, at least some of the problems can be attributed to the way the elections are carried out.
This election clearly shows that the voting method of the 19th century has been unable to fully express the wishes of such a large, diverse and scattered masses. And we also need a better way to make decisions.
Will digital voting be the solution?
What if we had such a system where everyone could vote through their mobile phones, as long as they opened a browser to verify the results of the election without trusting any central authority?
As people’s trust in collective decision-making increases and barriers to direct democracy shrink, this system will fundamentally transform citizen participation. Many problems faced by the current elections, from poor security conditions to voter turnout, etc., can be well improved even if they cannot be completely resolved through blockchain voting.
More and more people are beginning to regard digital voting as an important way to restore public trust. Recently, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and Ethereum co-founder V God discussed the matter.
"We should develop some products now, get it approved (obviously, this is the most difficult step), and then gain more than 300 million (fully KYC) users in 4 years. In addition, any capable developer It should be done voluntarily "for free"."
In this regard, V God replied: "The technical challenges faced in building a secure encrypted voting system are huge (and often underestimated), but in my opinion, this is 100% correct."
Despite the many challenges, digital voting seems to be an inevitable path for many countries. Therefore, we should not back down with the fluke of never implementing, but should actively respond to these challenges. The technology behind the most advanced cryptocurrencies has theoretically solved many of these problems, so this is a good starting point.
Trust and privacy dilemma
At present, our ability to implement safe and reliable digital elections is still unknown, and there are countless articles on this topic. One of the most famous is a user Tom Scott from YouTube. As he explained, the main problem of voting can be summarized as the dilemma between two seemingly opposite attributes, namely anonymity and trust.
Without relying on any authority, the only way to fully trust the integrity of the system is that it is end-to-end verifiable, accessible, and transparent to everyone. But if voting must be anonymous, how can this be done?
Provide trust with blockchain
Since the birth of blockchain, people have speculated that this technology may be used for voting. However, we have yet to see such a solution being implemented and deployed.
Many projects claim to use the blockchain to vote, but most of them just use it as a mechanism to publish votes collected and processed by other systems, and do not solve the core problem of digital voting. Until the ballots are announced, these can still be manipulated.
In order to provide end-to-end verifiability, the blockchain voting system must allow votes to be cast directly on the blockchain. Only under this system can any voter ensure that their votes are counted. In addition, the auditor can also check the integrity of the system from start to finish.
The blockchain voting system can guarantee that no votes will be lost or modified during transmission. In addition, with the openness and distributed nature of the blockchain, such a system is also highly resistant to DDoS attacks, and there is no central backend that can conduct improper behavior or be infected by malware. It is worth noting that as soon as the election is over, the results will be presented immediately.
Provide privacy with zero-knowledge proof
The transparency of blockchain technology limits its ability to provide privacy for digital voting.
Blockchain is the perfect structure for recording and ensuring data integrity, but it also allows tracking the origin of that data. Therefore, the anonymous voting system needs to decouple the transaction (ballot) from its source to ensure privacy. And zk-SNARKs is the solution.
zk-SNARK is a top-notch encryption proof structure, which provides us with the ability to prove that we have private information without revealing this information. When the technology is applied to voting, zk-SNARK tours can allow voters to prove that they belong to the survey population and can vote. In addition, all of these do not need to reveal the identity of the voters or allow their votes to be tracked by others.
This method is mainly carried out by creating the public keys of participants for a "census" and using zk-SNARK to achieve so that voters can prove that they belong to the scope of the investigation without revealing these keys.
Therefore, we can create a specific voting block chain, on this block chain, without paying fees, and can also vote after generating a zero-knowledge proof to prove that we belong to the census.
This is an incredible structure, just like magic. Since no signature appears on the ballot paper, its source address cannot be traced back. In addition, we have a proof that allows votes to be included in a fully end-to-end verifiable blockchain. Most importantly, voters do not need to pay gas or other fees, so no tokens are involved.
Can this model resist attacks?
Powerful public chains are inherently resistant to censorship attacks, but buying votes and bribery are also major issues.
If voters are forced to vote, they can overthrow their previous votes later without worrying about repeated voting. In addition, there are some techniques to prevent the purchase of votes, because once the election is over, anyone can show valid evidence for any vote.
Problems that blockchain voting cannot solve
The solution does not start and end with the blockchain, it is not just a technical problem. Because in addition, digital voting and elections face other challenges, such as accessibility and universal authentication, which require the participation of the government, and there is no simple technical solution.
But these problems can be solved through pilot project iteration and investment in better identity verification mechanisms. The fatal weakness of the voting system is the user client application (equivalent to a password wallet). Trust in the operating system and application programs may be necessary.
So, can we use blockchain for reliable elections?
The first compelling example of this solution has already appeared. When working on Vocdoni Open Stack, I was exposed to the possibility of blockchain voting. This is an open source project that has been working on deconstructing decentralized voting for the past three years.
We have brought a new solution to the unresolved problems, a trustless, end-to-end verifiable and anonymous voting system. Our technical infrastructure is publicly available and has been successfully verified in dozens of organizations, including Europe’s largest cultural organization, which has nearly 200,000 voters.
However, it is not realistic to think that we can achieve a perfect digital voting system, because 100% security does not exist. The same applies to voting at the physical level. But having said that, we can still establish a voting system to provide our digital society with more equal and more comprehensive protection than physical voting.
Original author: Nathaniel Williams
Original link:
https://www.coindesk.com/digital-voting-privacy-blockchain
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com