A thread about academia and blockchain voting.

While reading up on recent literature regarding online voting, I came across this piece from Sang-Oun Lee, IT Specialist from Chicago, that was evaluating whether it was safe to use: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3685381

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In it, I read the following:

"As aforementioned, a blockchain voting has already shown severe vulnerability for
allowing attackers to control the votes throughout the electoral cycle (Specter et al., 2020)."

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This sentence caught me off-guard since I don't know of any instance where blockchain technology has been used in any official elections. I investigated where the citation came from and found that it came from a group of scholars at MIT.

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Here is that article which I also found had some news articles related to it when it came out in November of 2020: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

I wanted to see what the argument was against blockchain voting where citizens use coins as votes, and they gave 5 arguments.

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1. "First of all, it does not provide a secret ballot: all votes are public, and users can prove to a third party how they voted, enabling coercion and vote-selling."

Well, most people are aware of what public keys look like. They are a jumbled mass of letters...

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...uppercase and lowercase. Nobody would have any idea who is who when looking at a voting results page. The only way this scenario would happen is if a person deliberately sold their vote to someone else and showed them after that they complied...

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..and this can also happen with traditional voting. How is this the number one concern?

2. "Second, this design relies on users being able to get their votes on the blockchain in the given election
time period...An adversary able to influence
network connectivity...

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...or to conduct a denial-of-service attack could keep users from voting until after the cutoff."

This is highly unlikely as hash rates have grown to record highs during this market in cryptocurrency. The chances of attacking a chain like Bitcoin are almost zero.

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3. "If the blockchain is compromised — e.g., if a majority of the miners or validators collude — then they could
create multiple versions of the blockchain to show different people, sowing discord."

Again, with larger blockchains this is no longer a worry.

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4. "If a user loses their private key, they can no longer vote, and if an attacker obtains a user’s private key they can now undetectably vote as that user."

My favorite. Attackers are going to spend their time attacking one person for one vote? Why can't people...

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who lose their private key just get a new one, and notify those that the old address is no longer valid? I'm confused, lol.

5. " If a user’s voting device (probably a mobile phone) is compromised, so could be their vote."

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Again, if a person can verify their vote, and it isn't what they wanted or they think that foul play occurred, they could easily change their vote and void the old address.

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That's it. This is why this article is titled: Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting.

The worst part is that people read this and then cite it in their article, like Lee. And what do they say again?

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"...blockchain voting has already shown severe vulnerability for allowing attackers to control the votes throughout the electoral cycle."

Really? When did that happen in the article cited from? Scholars need to be more careful when citing sources. This is a leap.

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We are getting to a point with the development of blockchain technology where these arguments are getting to be more fear-mongering than anything else. Scholars should do better moving forward.

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