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The United States Postal Service (USPS) has reportedly filed a patent for a blockchain-based mail-in voting system.
Following President Donald Trump’s conclusion that mail-in voting would represent ballots all over the place and fraudulent ballots would be named after dogs and dead people, the patent that was filed back in February 2020 was made public on Thursday 13th August.
A voting system can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer-readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain.”
“Often a voter is not able to or does not desire to go to a polling place to cast a vote. An election official in a jurisdiction may wish to send secure ballots via mail. Or, a jurisdiction may opt to utilize electronic resources for voting. In such cases, a secure voting system is desired.
The security of a voting system can be increased by using the dependability and security of the United States Postal Service or similar entity, and this can be incorporated with a secure computer system using a blockchain or distributed ledger to ensure vote security and to prevent tampering or modification of electronic voting results.”
The issues around online voting include server penetration attacks, client-device malware, denial-of-service attacks and other disruptions, all associated with infecting voters' computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots.
"If I were running for office and they decided to use blockchain for that election, I'd be scared," said Jeremy Epstein, vice chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's U.S. Technology Policy Committee.
he criticized blockchain and internet voting as a ready target for online attacks by foreign intelligence and said transmission of ballots over the internet, including by email, fax and blockchain systems, are seriously vulnerable.
There are many reasons blockchain is not good for voting, Epstein said. For one, it assumes there's no malware in the voter's computer. It also assumes you want all the votes to be perennially public, because if someone finds a way to hack into the blockchain, everyone's vote becomes public. And, while blockchain networks may be able to handle small absentee voter populations, the technology could not stand up to use by the general voter populace and its volumes.
While paper ballots are not tamper-proof, they are not vulnerable to the same wholesale fraud or manipulation associated with internet voting, Epstein said.
"Tampering with mailed paper ballots is a one-at-a-time attack. Infecting voters' computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots are both effective methods for large-scale corruption," Epstein said.
originally posted by: Notoneofyou
Why can't we just require the use of Real ID?
Fill out your ballot, put your I'd in a box prepared for it, make 2 copies.
One goes in the ballot box, one is kept for your personal records. An automated verification, with proof.
originally posted by: xuenchen
All goes back to the best way is to use real ballots at a polling location and verify all IDs and make sure each ballot is counted by hand with multiple video cameras confirming everything. Easy to do. 😎
he criticized blockchain and internet voting as a ready target for online attacks by foreign intelligence and said transmission of ballots over the internet, including by email, fax and blockchain systems, are seriously vulnerable.
There are many reasons blockchain is not good for voting, Epstein said. For one, it assumes there's no malware in the voter's computer. It also assumes you want all the votes to be perennially public, because if someone finds a way to hack into the blockchain, everyone's vote becomes public
Infecting voters' computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots are both effective methods for large-scale corruption,
Estonia was the first country in the world to use Internet
voting nationally, and today more than 30% of its ballots
are cast online. In this paper, we analyze the security of
the Estonian I-voting system based on a combination of
in-person election observation, code review, and adversarial
testing. Adopting a threat model that considers the advanced
threats faced by a national election system—including dis-
honest insiders and state-sponsored attacks—we find that
the I-voting system has serious architectural limitations and
procedural gaps that potentially jeopardize the integrity of
elections. In experimental attacks on a reproduction of the
system, we demonstrate how such attackers could target
the election servers or voters’ clients to alter election results
or undermine the legitimacy of the system. Our findings
illustrate the practical obstacles to Internet voting in the
modern world, and they carry lessons for Estonia, for other
countries considering adopting such systems, and for the
security research community.
originally posted by: dug88
a reply to: projectvxn
From my op
he criticized blockchain and internet voting as a ready target for online attacks by foreign intelligence and said transmission of ballots over the internet, including by email, fax and blockchain systems, are seriously vulnerable.
There are many reasons blockchain is not good for voting, Epstein said. For one, it assumes there's no malware in the voter's computer. It also assumes you want all the votes to be perennially public, because if someone finds a way to hack into the blockchain, everyone's vote becomes public
Infecting voters' computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots are both effective methods for large-scale corruption,
At that point you're putting your trust in the security used on the servers that handle counting votes etc. It's a single point of failure and strong a vector for attack. A single security failure would destroy public trust and compromise the entire election and come counting time, those servers are going to be the target of God knows how many people trying to # with the election and all it takes is one person to potentially cause chaos and instability to any government or country using a system like that.
In experimental attacks on a reproduction of the
system, we demonstrate how such attackers could target
the election servers or voters’ clients to alter election results
or undermine the legitimacy of the system.