[kwlug-disc] Say No To Electronic Voting ...

[Mikalai Birukou]

> Hi Jeff: Here's some fuel for the e-voting fire on the KWLUG mailing list:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC-rJX0Nmxg
>
I won't call this a flame thingy. It is truly an important subject with 
many sides to analyze, and any argument should be considered. If it 
doesn't fit into a tweet, it is not necessarily flaming :) . The more 
arguments, the more existing understanding we surface, the more we can 
talk in prepared presentation. In particular, after viewing 
aforementioned lecture, I can be more fancy and say that what I want to 
talk about is an end-to-end verifiable voting process with privacy, of 
which there are many shades of protection.


> I was at that lecture (obnoxious guy in the front row), it changed my 
> mind about e-voting, that anonymity (secret ballot) is incompatible 
> with the requirement for ensuring there is only one vote per person.

In this statement I hear notes of "e-voting won't work". If I hear it 
correctly, specify precise argument, or a connected chain of arguments. 
No-go statements are universally difficult to prove. Thus, I suggest 
that you may have a feeling, feeling influenced by a nice talk, but a 
feeling nonetheless. Let me give an analogy. You might be using an app 
like Signal for your messaging end-to-end secured. But you don't know if 
firmware of your device isn't snooping on your keys. Ya, firmware will 
send out mere 1kB worth of signal to leak your key :) . Should we try to 
have end-to-end encrypted tools, or should we give up?


1) Confidentiality as an obligation. As soon as minute 3, speaker says 
that confidentiality of vote is not a right, but must be an obligation. 
Let me call BS on this one, backed by reality, and not mere opinion.

Right now government of Belarus tries to convince people with different 
logical fallacies that confidentiality is an obligation. People want to 
transparently count their votes, to make all those millions of photos of 
ballots that can't be ignored. People want to know for certain that they 
are the majority, and government is the minority, before deciding to go 
in front of tanks (a literal option).

Right now, "confidentiality as an obligation" is a tool for keeping in 
power forces that don't have majority support and also count votes.


2) Coercion. Let me add another sample of how it may happen.

In Belarus, people are encouraged to vote in days before election day. 
Night is the time to fix ballots in the box. It's this simple. My own 
suspicion is that employed tricks come from USSR times. And this mode of 
faking elections might be 90 years old, not mere 15-ish.


3) It seems to me that we should talk about election processes through 
the prism of fail mode. Any process is good, when parties behave 
honestly. How processes may fail? For example, Australian Ballot system 
has been failing in Belarus, and "confidentiality as an obligation" is a 
recipe for bloodier resolution, instead of a more peaceful consensus. 
Which fail scenarios are real? Does a few coerced-by-partner ballots out 
weigh on option of having a verifiable count to protect against a coup? 
(Hi, Bolivia.)


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