Thanks @souperk@reddthat.com,
i believe many users will be interested in these papers about cryptographically secure voting.
Amongst them there would be :
@rimu@piefed.social
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk
@brbposting@sh.itjust.works
Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?
souperk@reddthat.com 2 months ago
For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.
Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.
A_A@lemmy.world 2 months ago
souperk@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Found this review
A_A@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No I was not sarcastic. So now i am trying to read your paper and i think that it is above my knowledge level.
As a layman i had the intuition that instead of having two accounts as i proposed for voting and commenting which was implemented by @rimu, we might have had something like blockchain or filecoin or some coin that would represent voting power and that would be based on our commenting value… so that coin would have been an intermediary to make voting anonymous.
Finally i know enough about science that i know that i don’t know much.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
This isn’t going to solve anything. Cryptographically secure voting helps when you can ensure that each person only gets to vote once. But anyone can just sign up for more accounts or make loads of bot accounts and vote multiple times. This solves nothing.
wazoobonkerbrain@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s interesting. I have read multiple comments to the effect that it would not be possible for lemmy to implement anonymous voting because the underlying ActivityPub protocol does not support it. So it sounds like solutions do exist, although I suppose the effort required to modify ActivityPub is too much, more likely the feature will be included in some successor to the fediverse.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Wow neat!! Eating our cake & having it
Thanks @A_A@lemmy.world
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.
That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.
nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
What keeps from doing that right now? You can just create an instance and bot accounts on that
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their “users” and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.
souperk@reddthat.com 2 months ago
If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.
If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.
The entire problem is that you can’t trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn’t check if it’s genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).