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.
All prior crypto-based voting systems I've studied rely on hash collisions, algorithmically simulating the secure one-way hash of physically dropping a ballot into a box, for an individual's ballot to get lost in the herd. But for this to work, ballots have to be simple and elections have to be large (enough).
In the USA, ballots are complicated and precincts are small. Appropriate for elections administration based on the Australian Ballot, bad for crypto-based balloting system.
--
I'm very surprised this is the first I've heard about Neff shuffling.
But I know a lot about VoteHere. Even though they are a proven bad actor in this space, I'll suspend disbelief and see if something good came out of their efforts. The Agora people appear smart, earnest. So maybe there's something here.
If Neff shuffling (or something similar) actually works for this application, it'd be remarkable. Least importantly, I'd have to update my world view. Specifically: no fully digital voting system can both protect the secret ballot and ensure a public vote count. (In practice, electronic voting systems do neither.)
--
PS- Scanning the other comments, feel compelled to point out:
Design the whole system. Understand election administration. Protecting the ballot is not enough. Information also leaks from poll books, voting history, etc., which then deanonymizes the secret ballot.
For Sierra Leone, Agora might be a great idea. Maybe the benefit of extending the franchise (reduced costs, increasing access) outweighs the loss of individual privacy.
> 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.
I don't agree. The amount of damage to the voting mechanism a malicious group can do when physically controlling a polling station (which in itself proves a huge amount of reach and political power) is way greater than thugs coming to someone's house to check the right person was on a 'virtual ballot'.
I agree that with this approach you can do voter information data gathering 'at scale' but if you can't really do coercion 'at scale' if you can't afford either violence 'at scale' or similar enforcement via the public system (no benefits, pension cut, etc..) then it's all for nothing. But if you can do all in the first place then there's no sense in talking about the method of voting, neither will be less secure or less private than the other.
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.
Physical control of polling station is not required. Voters are getting the filled ballot outside the polling station from organizers, tossing it into the box and bringing the empty ballot back.
Both systems have their disadvantages. Electronic voting, especially when it's not completely anonymous, opens up the voting process for all kinds of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.
Take Turkey or Russia for example. Voters know exactly that the current radical governments can track their ballot numbers, so they'll think twice before voting against them.
“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.
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.
Charitably: Journalists don't know what questions to ask.
I was called a "paranoid sweaty kook" by a local paper for having the audacity to explain how our central count works. (TL;DR: It's very hard to protect voter privacy when using postal ballots.)
Election administration is hard, with many subtle, counter intuitive corner cases.
--
I scanned Agora's website, papers, etc.
Two things bothered me.
First, they spend too much time saying what they're not, comparing themselves to other known bad electronic voting systems. Yayaya. We all know those systems suck. Tell us how Agora is awesome.
Second, none of these proposals start with first principles, starting assumptions. Tell us what forms of election administration, voting system, and ballots your system supports. For example, paper ballots cast at poll sites in the USA is predicated on the Australian Ballot, aka private voting and public counting. Scanning thru Agora's materials, I have no idea what type of elections it's appropriate for.
I was heavily downvoted for expressing this exact concern regarding Keybase using Stellar (a centralized token system forked from Ripple) and the common traps that leaders buy into regarding blockchain-hype.
(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')
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....
How is voter authentication to the system done? I think with blockchain voting there's still a huge issue surrounding validating that voter is an actual voter/citizen, and not someone else voting on their behalf (or on behalf of dead people).
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.
This is the part of the conversation when a Canadian points out that federal elections are conducted on straightforward paper ballots where you mark an X next to the person’s name. They are hand-counted with reps from all of the parties and election officials present, and it can take hours before the results are ready. No machines and no reason to screw up a process that every one understands.
There are a lot of things in our lives that would benefit from greater efficiency, this isn’t one of them.
As for the blockchain, do computer books for kids not start with a lesson on GIGO anymore? You still need to trust the information that gets written to the chain is valid.
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?
> Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand
"Black box" abstraction is utilized everywhere in the world and has been a core part of many functional systems. That's a silly basis to dismiss any technology.
"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."
I for one am quite happy that a migration from horse carriages, understandable by a middle schooler, to cars and trains has happened.
I don't have a position on using the blockchain for elections, I'm just not convinced by your point.
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
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]
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.
"... 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.
I think what actually happened is that no candidate won enough votes, so a runoff is required.
"The National Electoral Commission (NEC) declared a runoff after none of the 16 presidential hopefuls on the March 7 ballot paper secured the 55% needed to secure an outright victory."
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.
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.
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?
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.
Found no description of how exactly people vote with Agora 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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?
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.
[+] [-] KMag|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
A verifiable secret shuffle and its application to e-voting [2001] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502000
All prior crypto-based voting systems I've studied rely on hash collisions, algorithmically simulating the secure one-way hash of physically dropping a ballot into a box, for an individual's ballot to get lost in the herd. But for this to work, ballots have to be simple and elections have to be large (enough).
In the USA, ballots are complicated and precincts are small. Appropriate for elections administration based on the Australian Ballot, bad for crypto-based balloting system.
--
I'm very surprised this is the first I've heard about Neff shuffling.
But I know a lot about VoteHere. Even though they are a proven bad actor in this space, I'll suspend disbelief and see if something good came out of their efforts. The Agora people appear smart, earnest. So maybe there's something here.
If Neff shuffling (or something similar) actually works for this application, it'd be remarkable. Least importantly, I'd have to update my world view. Specifically: no fully digital voting system can both protect the secret ballot and ensure a public vote count. (In practice, electronic voting systems do neither.)
--
PS- Scanning the other comments, feel compelled to point out:
Design the whole system. Understand election administration. Protecting the ballot is not enough. Information also leaks from poll books, voting history, etc., which then deanonymizes the secret ballot.
For Sierra Leone, Agora might be a great idea. Maybe the benefit of extending the franchise (reduced costs, increasing access) outweighs the loss of individual privacy.
[+] [-] decebalus1|8 years ago|reply
> 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.
I don't agree. The amount of damage to the voting mechanism a malicious group can do when physically controlling a polling station (which in itself proves a huge amount of reach and political power) is way greater than thugs coming to someone's house to check the right person was on a 'virtual ballot'.
I agree that with this approach you can do voter information data gathering 'at scale' but if you can't really do coercion 'at scale' if you can't afford either violence 'at scale' or similar enforcement via the public system (no benefits, pension cut, etc..) then it's all for nothing. But if you can do all in the first place then there's no sense in talking about the method of voting, neither will be less secure or less private than the other.
[+] [-] craftyguy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monort|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_train
[+] [-] yAnonymous|8 years ago|reply
Take Turkey or Russia for example. Voters know exactly that the current radical governments can track their ballot numbers, so they'll think twice before voting against them.
[+] [-] apo|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Karunamon|8 years ago|reply
https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
I was called a "paranoid sweaty kook" by a local paper for having the audacity to explain how our central count works. (TL;DR: It's very hard to protect voter privacy when using postal ballots.)
Election administration is hard, with many subtle, counter intuitive corner cases.
--
I scanned Agora's website, papers, etc.
Two things bothered me.
First, they spend too much time saying what they're not, comparing themselves to other known bad electronic voting systems. Yayaya. We all know those systems suck. Tell us how Agora is awesome.
Second, none of these proposals start with first principles, starting assumptions. Tell us what forms of election administration, voting system, and ballots your system supports. For example, paper ballots cast at poll sites in the USA is predicated on the Australian Ballot, aka private voting and public counting. Scanning thru Agora's materials, I have no idea what type of elections it's appropriate for.
[+] [-] mtzaldo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staplers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iokevins|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] Ihfhcub|8 years ago|reply
99.9999% of every mention of blockchain is a scam or misleading hype
And yet I think bitcoin is an important and revolutionary technology
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sannee|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krrrh|8 years ago|reply
There are a lot of things in our lives that would benefit from greater efficiency, this isn’t one of them.
As for the blockchain, do computer books for kids not start with a lesson on GIGO anymore? You still need to trust the information that gets written to the chain is valid.
[+] [-] icelancer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
"Black box" abstraction is utilized everywhere in the world and has been a core part of many functional systems. That's a silly basis to dismiss any technology.
[+] [-] kkleindev|8 years ago|reply
I for one am quite happy that a migration from horse carriages, understandable by a middle schooler, to cars and trains has happened.
I don't have a position on using the blockchain for elections, I'm just not convinced by your point.
[+] [-] utnick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amitbr|8 years ago|reply
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]
[+] [-] Kliment|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noballot|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
...
> it is still unclear who won
[+] [-] aptsurdist|8 years ago|reply
"The National Electoral Commission (NEC) declared a runoff after none of the 16 presidential hopefuls on the March 7 ballot paper secured the 55% needed to secure an outright victory."
http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidenti...
[+] [-] darawk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twisell|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finchisko|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] thatf|8 years ago|reply
Either way, I can't see how fraud is prevented even with a blockchain in place.
[+] [-] iafrikan|8 years ago|reply
Older thread below.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872
[+] [-] GenericsMotors|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pishpash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramblerman|8 years ago|reply
so Switzerland?
[+] [-] tardo99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joool|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
[+] [-] sly010|8 years ago|reply
Does this basically mean authentication is centralized?
[+] [-] luckycharms810|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimrod0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mozumder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineiti|8 years ago|reply
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.