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Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols
Hollow Being writes "In an essay posted to Threatpost, Bruce Schneier makes the argument that self-enforcing protocols are better suited to security and problem-solving. From the article: 'Self-enforcing protocols are safer than other types because participants don't gain an advantage from cheating. Modern voting systems are rife with the potential for cheating, but an open show of hands in a room — one that everyone in the room can count for himself — is self-enforcing. On the other hand, there's no secret ballot, late voters are potentially subjected to coercion, and it doesn't scale well to large elections. But there are mathematical election protocols that have self-enforcing properties, and some cryptographers have suggested their use in elections.'"
Like everything else, both self-enforcing 'protocols' and someone in between, say paypal, rely on trust from people. It also relies on the fact that businesses will take a major hit when someone says something bad about them or if they fraud. This is exactly the same with laws. You cant enforce it, but you can make consequences for breaking laws bad enough so people dont want to break them.
In high school I was teached that every happy customer tells about their good experience to 3-4 people, but every unhappy customer tells about it to 20 people. It's a great advice. Once the bad word gets out, your sales are going to suck and you lose customers. This is also why you need the trust and good name with self-enforcing protocols if not using middle man like paypal.
This can also be seen on webmasters forums and the like. People have certain amount of trust points according to their past and who they've done business with. You can instantly see who is reliable and who you can do business with.
Problem without using third party is that you cannot get to that trust level as newcomer and that it takes time to work it. When there's someone trusted in the middle of the transaction, you have some guarantee that you wont be cheated (or lose your personal details etc to whatever kind of fraud). In this case the trustful middlehand is good.
So it only works if the other party is big enough. When voting, you rely on trusting the goverment (now this sentence is so gonna get some paranoid persons replying :). If not, you need a middle party that is big enough that you can trust them instead.
As a side note, this is why we still rely on banks and even on our cash - We trust that our money on our bank accounts will still be available to us, and that our $10 bills wont just suddenly become worthless.
After reading that, I was left with the feeling that I had no idea what I had read it for. Was it a call to arms? Was it a rant about our whole world? It seemed to offer more problems than solutions...
The show of hands is not self-enforcing precisely because a non-secret ballot is subject to coercion. People vote their peers instead of their conscience.
Selecting a security protocol that adversely alters the results is a common mistake among information security personnel.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What is the proposed self-enforcing voting protocol? With no suggestion made, what is the interest of this article to the slashdot community?
Here is the solution to all voting problems.
Goals:
1. Confirm your vote is collected correctly.
2. Try to assure the people that no votes were added.
3. Don't hide results.
4. Keep votes anonymous.
Solution:
1. Keep a large public vote database.
2. Be able to Look up votes by voter id, county, polling location and time.
3. Keep large visible clock and voter count at each polling station. Every time a person goes into the voting room, the count goes up. Voter counts can be confirmed online. Maybe even in a graph over time.
The voter should be able to go online and see his own vote. Since every voter can see every vote counted up in every polling location in the country and know that everyone else can, they'll be assured of the results. If they're paranoid, they can watch their local polling station's voter count and confirm the published results don't have added votes.
Note: Maybe instead of voter id's, it should be a random confirmation code thats generated on the spot. That should be even more anonymous.
Problems: Some people actually vote for the wrong person on accident. That's unfortunate, but the solution isn't to hide it from them.
If vote online doesn't match your vote, have a dispute process. Keep track of dispute counts over time, for the public to see.
in the federalist papers:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm
They thought about it, but free speech trumped the elimination of political parties. Always floors me how much foresight they had.
And when your boss says, "By the way, if you vote for Dan, you get to keep your job - and I want to see your voting receipt to prove it, or out you go!"? That's one of the main reasons that we have private polling in the first place.
How about going back to the old ways - electronically generating, at the polling place, an anonymous, very clear, human-readable piece of paper describing your vote. Use machines to create as many as you want, one at a time, on special pieces of paper that are handed out either as you walk in the door and get IDd or upon the insertion of your previous one into a shredder. Once you're happy with it, it goes into the voting box which a) saves it, and b) scans it and records the data, unofficially (ie: the piece of paper wins in a recount).
Dead simple, totally private, and fully auditable. Plus, with an open standard, there could be different types of paper-generating-machines for people with different needs, no problem. No hanging chads, no huge expense, quick access to unofficial results and about as easy a recount procedure as you could ask for.
Finally, at the end of the day, do it the CA way and have the boxes opened up and tallied by hand for the major issue and a random selection of minor ones at each station. Anyone can watch, and any discrepancy over .1% of the total is assumed to be computer-tampering and triggers a full manual count for all issues at that station, and a more thorough audit to determine the source of the discrepancy.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
voting systems should better reflect the people's actual will, by being a little more complex
you're never going to get the nuance of the people's will 100%, but you can do a lot better. for example: borda voting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count
just rank candidates in the order you like them. then, in a divisive election is an opportunity for everyone's second best choice to become the winner rather than partisan first choices, that one half of the population hates, barely edging out the other
now take as an example the disgusting 2000 presidential election: if people were allowed to merely rank candidates rather than be forced to pick one, who would have won? john mccain. however you think of him as a choice in the 2008 election, mccain was certainly a better choice than gore or bush in 2000, and the nation actually thought so. if the people were allowed to rank a list of candidates, his name would have come out as the number 2 choice of everyone, and he would have won. but the system worked against mccain. instead, various undemocratic closed door machinations led the republican party to choose monkey boy bush over the more deserving mccain, and so the democrats who would have ranked mccain second best never would have been able to register their approval of mccain over bush. borda voting does away with the whole party primary nonsense: democrats field 4 or 5 presidential candidates, republicans field 4 or 5 presidential candidates. and the voters merely rank them. then the voting system better reflects the nuances of public opinion, and allows for the candidate whom people really like to emerge. who should really lead the nation? by better reflecting the people's affinity or dislike. no more divisive partisan bullshit
another good system: approval voting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
easier to understand than borda voting with similar results: checkbox next to anyone you like. voting for no one and voting for everyone has the same effect. in between, are abilities to express approval and disapproval, and the winner is a simple tally of whomever gets the most votes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, the voting method you describe is more-or-less what optical-scan ballots are all about. While they aren't exactly "the old ways", they work extremely well, and give you an auditable vote in case of recount.
For instance, in the Franken-Coleman senatorial race, we had pieces of paper that could be gone through and understood. Yes, it took a really long time, yes, it produced votes for Lizard People, but the end result was something that independent observers could see as a correct reflection of the will of the people. With an electronic ballot, we wouldn't have had anything to recount, just a computer telling us a number.
I am officially gone from
result in a more mainstream choice? i am flabbergasted how such a conclusion could enter your mind
the 2000 election is an indisputable example of how the current system wound up choosing a president that was not mainstream. we got instead a cleavage of the country into left and right, with resentment and hatred festering
mccain was a better mainstream choice: his secondary appeal to democrats was much larger than his primary appeal to the right wing, which is what cost him the party's nomination. so if mccain was allowed to proceed to a final approval or borda vote, he would beat bush and gore on account of his much broader secondary appeal
meanwhile, our current system divides, it doesn't unite: it stokes the fires of partisanship, it cleaves the american people into two fiercely divided camps where the loudest most blind voices dominate
such voices would still exist if we voted borda or approval, but more moderate voices would come to dominate, simply because a different voting system rewards a different strategy and set of issues
partisan morons are tearing this country apart. we need less of them, not more of them, just look at the idiocy that dominates the discussion on healthcare right now. how do we get less partisans? we adopt a system which rewards them less. our current unideal system rewards partisan loudmouth bickering idiots, to tragic results
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe it's merely a self-fulfilling protocol?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
The article is interesting, but Schneier is not the first person to consider such questions. Last year (I think?), Ron Rivest gave a couple talks at my school on the subject of voting. One of them was about auditing, and the other was about using crypto to achieve safer e-voting. You can see something similar to what he said here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/RivestSmith-ThreeVotingProtocolsThreeBallotVAVAndTwin.pdf Some of the comments here have been arguing over the relative merits of verifiability and secrecy (as in having voting receipts or whatever). Cryptographic methods can be used to partly reconcile those ostensibly contradictory goals. Anyhows, have fun reading.
Please, stop spreading misinformation. ACORN itself has not even been charged with any wrongdoing, let alone convicted. Rather, contractors hired by ACORN to get voter registrations have been charged. Rather than a conspiracy to fraudulently register voters, it appears that several lazy contractors filled out forms in order to get paid without doing any work. It should be further noted that, in many states, it would be illegal for ACORN to discard suspicious registrations submitted by their workers---instead, they are required to pass them along to the state, which is the only entity with the authority to discard registrations (as for the reason, imagine if ACORN decided that only people registering as Democrats should be allowed to register---they could discard all registrations with the Republican box ticked, thus committing another kind of fraud). In short, it is evident that some voter registration fraud did occur, but that it was almost certainly the result of laziness on the part of workers, rather than an intentional effort to commit fraud on the part of ACORN. Never attribute to malice that which can more reasonably be attributed to laziness, incompetence, or stupidity.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/acorn_accusations.html
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