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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 3 months ago by lalo@discuss.tchncs.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

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[-] souperk@reddthat.com 36 points 3 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 4 points 3 months ago

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

[-] souperk@reddthat.com 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but I found this review.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858

I had done some research about a year ago, but I don't have the papers saved.

[-] A_A@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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.

Edit : after a rapid overview of the article i would say that this method :
"Blind Signature-Based e-Voting"
would be most appropriate to our social media voting and i noticed the work they have done is more targeting national elections where the outcome is much more important.