Parman - Activate OP_GFY now!!'s avatar
Parman - Activate OP_GFY now!! parman@nostrich.cc 1 year ago
I'm announcing BitVotr, a new voting protocol to fight election fraud, releasing today to the public domain. The whitepaper of the protocol is available on GitHub and has a website, BitVotr.com. Pull requests welcome. Questions and comments welcome in GitHub issues section, and will go towards a FAQ document later. The protocol introduces new concepts and borrows from old... - Proof of Tax linked to public keys (new). - Vote merging for anonymity (borrowed from coin mixing). - Peer to peer network to submit, sign, and merge votes (every voter is a peer). - Tamper proofing of count via pgp signatures. - Peers use RAFT protocol for consensus and data protection (borrowed). - Byzantine Fault Tolerance thresholds for minimum verification, and defends against network attack. - Data dissemination of the tally and signatures to Nostr and BitTorrent (no blockchain or token required). - Vote count by the public (like nodes in Bitcoin verifying blocks). - Election clock using Bitcoin timechain (without writing to it). BitVote doesn't force a tyrannical government to be honest and benign, instead, it makes election fraud evident. Voting doesn't overthrow tyranny, only revolution or total collapse does. Step 1 is to overcome the gaslighting and make fraud undeniable. Of course dishonest governments will reject this. The system must begin small, prove itself, and be unavoidable to larger and larger democracies. This is not an endorsement of voting as an ethical way to organise society, but if we are going to vote, it should be verifiable by the people it affects. image

Replies (17)

LogicallyMinded's avatar
LogicallyMinded 1 year ago
Very interesting! I’m wondering if you’ve put any thoughts on the issue of votes buying or the risks of coercion when voting online. Could we enforce the votes using this system to be cast at a designated voting location where vote secrecy can be guaranteed?
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npub10yah...39j5 1 year ago
Amazing! I will read it soon. Fantastic that you took the time to set this up.After discussioms and refinement, It's jist a matter of time before someone builds the first app for this.
brito's avatar
brito brito@nostr.pt 1 year ago
Good point. This isn't yet prepared for verification of identity. Someone with inside access to tax records can fabricate valid votes
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Den Yellek's avatar
Den Yellek 1 year ago
I think it is easy to quickly dismiss ideas such as this as never being possible in reality but you have summed it up here: "BitVotr is not something easy to implement logistically, particularly with a population not ready for such technology. It will require a transition period and testing, but in the future, using such technology will be second nature for most of the population." When the internet was first released the idea that every person would have to have an email to navigate modern life was easy to dismiss as too complicated. But as technologies become ubiquitous we begin to wonder not how it could be that everyone could possibly all use these new technologies but rather how it could be that they ever went without them. Faith in democracy is diminishing quickly. It is up for debate if that is a good thing or a bad thing however if faith in democracy is to be restored it is likely to be through an open technological solution like this.
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Den Yellek's avatar
Den Yellek 1 year ago
From my reading inside access to tax records would allow you to determine who a public key belonged to (most relevant in initial mixing round) but you would not be able to fabricate a vote without the private key held by the voting individual.
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brito's avatar
brito brito@nostr.pt 1 year ago
What I've seen in the past is that the rogue party can register old people or those groups known to avoid voting in the past and therefore acquire valid private keys. The few that want to vote would ask for the private key and a new one would be provided to them. The other topic is private key interception, copying them in transit to the recipient. You are checking through the pub keys who has voted and then injecting the votes on election night when it becomes obvious who isn't going to vote on that event. Voting in presence with a picture taken would solve these identity issues. There would always exist some fraud, just difficult to scale into larger numbers.
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Den Yellek's avatar
Den Yellek 1 year ago
Yes all valid concerns. Part of your first point is mitigated by the need to link private keys to tax returns or other documents such that just issuing new keys would not be possible and would make fraud obvious. And presumably it would not be possible to intercept private keys in transit as they should never be transmitted. However even when voting with your own private keys voting at home or under the watchful eye of someone else will yield different results than voting in a private ballot box. I am sure there are many people who lie to their significant other about their voting habits.
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LogicallyMinded's avatar
LogicallyMinded 1 year ago
Yeah, I think a system requiring in-person voting is still preferable to prevent voting buying/coercion. But certainly that’s not an issue with BitVotr in particular. Mail-in ballots and online voting are subject to this issue. Even for in-person voting no cellphone/camera should be allowed in the voting booth.
Roark Janis's avatar
Roark Janis roarkjanis@primal.net 1 year ago
This is a very interesting idea and I appreciate how much thinking and effort it took to put it together. I hope you will post updates periodically about it.
brito's avatar
brito brito@nostr.pt 1 year ago
In my country we have the private keys directly inside our citizen card since the last 20 years, now is even becoming contactless on the next iteration. We can sign events or PDF documents that digitally prove our identity. Still, the private keys are passive to interception. There is no way to prove that a rogue party is not copying the private keys. About 50% of my country does not vote, it would be easy for the largest party with key employees everywhere inside the gov systems to leak who hasn't been voting and to cast the vote on their behalf. There isn't a need for tax records, we have an accurate registry of who is a citizen and still we wouldn't vote digitally without physical verification because of fraud. That is the reason why we keep using paper ballots and physical voting with parties in the room to check what happens. Identity verification is the key aspect that needs to be assured.
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Den Yellek's avatar
Den Yellek 1 year ago
Interesting how you have keys in a citizen card. I have not heard of anything like that here. I was thinking more along the lines of my bitcoin/nostr keys which are generated locally and not transmitted anywhere. And a key difference as well is that only 50% of your population vote. Here in Australia voting is compulsory so we do not have that same problem that you speak of. Using this system they would seemingly not even have to leak who had not voted ad the keys that voted would be public.
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npub1322q...spw0 1 year ago
Well done Parman. I do really hope this gets implemented in El Salvador as a first nation to demonstrate the full support and good for the country that El Presidente has done
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