Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

I cautiously applaud the progress.<p>Back in Ron Rivest&#x27;s 6.857 computer security class, we spent some time on electronic voting. If you&#x27;re not careful to get the privacy right, you open up more opportunities for coercion.<p>With anonymous paper ballots, coercion can and does happen, but it basically requires physical control of the polling station &#x2F; voting booth to pull off.<p>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>“Anonymized votes&#x2F;ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar.</i><p>The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying.<p>&quot;Blockchain Technology&quot; 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.<p>That said, I&#x27;m very skeptical about the utility of &quot;Blockchain Technology&quot; in voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud detectable?<p>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.<p>Not so with the Agora system. And I&#x27;m afraid that journalists consistently refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.

They used Agora:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;</a><p>(Aside: forgot to turn off my extension and so it appeared as, &#x27;Sierra Leone just ran the first &quot;Multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet&quot;-based election&#x27;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cynthiablee&#x2F;blockchain-to-spreadsheet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cynthiablee&#x2F;blockchain-to-spreadsheet</a>

Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics&#x2F;CS PhD to understand just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler doesn&#x27;t seem all that great.<p>The article talks about &quot;fully-transparent voting solution for this future&quot;, yet I somehow don&#x27;t see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.

by &#x27;blockchain-based&#x27; 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&#x27; 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.<p>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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ring_signature" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ring_signature</a>]

If it&#x27;s just electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private company, the system is as vulnerable as any other e-voting system.<p>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.

&gt; thereby offering instant access to the election results.<p>...<p>&gt; it is still unclear who won

This has really gone to far. What’s next?<p>Some dictator will run the first blockchain-based death sentence via a distributed big data popular jury to guarantee a fair and auditable trial?<p>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.

I miss details here.<p>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).<p>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?

Found no description of how exactly people vote with Agora <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;</a>: 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?<p>Either way, I can&#x27;t see how fraud is prevented even with a blockchain in place.

Correction: Aroga, Swiss company, used blockchain to tally and track election results.<p>Older thread below.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16578872" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16578872</a>

&quot;blockchain-based election&quot; 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.<p>Perhaps if the company had used Postgres to store the results there would have been an article called &quot;Sierra Leone just ran the first RDBMS-based election&quot;? 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.

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&#x27;t back-propagate fabricated blocks into the chain?

&quot;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]&quot;<p>Does this basically mean authentication is centralized?

Paper describing the Agora network: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agora.vote&#x2F;Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf</a>

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.

They did use our permissioned skipchain available on: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dedis&#x2F;cothority" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dedis&#x2F;cothority</a> and ran some nodes on a server.<p>Instead of burning 200kWh for one transaction, a voting consensus system is enough.<p>BTW, there is also an e voting system in that repo, using neff shuffles.

I am positive about this first step. Looking forward to seeing more of this in for example (or rather specifically) Switzerland.

Can anyone comment on specifics of how the Agora system used here work in practical terms? For instance do ballots have a QR code? How are the entered into the ledger at polling stations, etc?<p>I&#x27;m happy to see articles on the practical benefits of blockchains. I feel like they been drowned out by the media hysteria of cryptocurrencies lately.

Blockchain-based elections seemed inevitable but I never saw it coming from a national election proxy-ballot first. I thought maybe stockholders at an AGM for a blue-chip company would be the first large-scale example.

I&#x27;ve got a question I didn&#x27;t see answered in the article.<p>Is the ledger hidden until the end of the election or publicly visible throughout?<p>I only ask as it&#x27;s a subtle technical difference that could massively influence the outcome.

I would rather have a Delegative Democracy (that I&#x27;m implementing in the Points Project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pointsproject.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pointsproject.org</a>)

Blockchain provides no advantage over other technologies in elections.

How does it compare to Scantegrity [1]?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scantegrity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scantegrity</a>

Since this was just a proof of concept, I&#x27;d love to see the blockchain results compared to the actual results.

Does anyone know if this decentralized with miners rewarded with coins to keep the nodes and network running?

I&#x27;m glad to see they&#x27;ve backed away from doing an ICO token for now. That was sketchy as hell.

&gt; His chosen successor, Samura Kamara, is being challenged by 15 other candidates<p>&gt; Experts say a presidential run-off is likely as a first-round win would require one candidate taking 55% of the vote.<p>When even Sierra Leone has a more democratic voting system than Freedom Land™ (and I&#x27;m not talking about blockchains).

Good effort for trying, at least we have some potential even if it fails.

Confirmation for the perspective that Africa is cyberpunk

This is an amazing milestone, and a stake in the heart of the idea that blockchain tech is no different than &quot;tulip bulbs&quot;.

DO NOT ACCEPT ANY DIGITAL ONLY VOTING SYSTEM.<p>UNLESS THERE IS A WAY TO PHYSICALLY AUDIT THE SYSTEM, AND ESPECIALLY YOUR OWN VOTE, ALL SUCH VOTES SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.<p>DIGITAL ONLY VOTING IS A FORM OF VOTER SUPPRESSION AND CANNOT BE CONSIDERED LEGITIMATE.

I think this is really cool. A trendy buzzword tech may bring more people to the polls, and the unforgable blockchain technology seems to have a use case here. I wonder how they prevent people from making multiple accounts. The fact that generally I find block chains slow, doesn&#x27;t negatively affect this type of system. Great!

I don&#x27;t think that decentralized voting is a good thing at all. Voting will lose its significance when a vote can be issued with barely more than just a click. Elections and votes will become increasingly meaningless and much more frequent.<p>Social interaction suffers greatly today, because of the success of Social Media, which was praised as a new and easy way to socially interact without going outside.<p>Blockchain might be the right choice of technology for the voting process, people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person!