Proposing a New OSMF Board Election System

You are free to spend your time on whatever you want, but here you are also making explicit requests of other people in the community. That does come at a cost to the project.

In addition, what you have done so far, describing an “OSMF voting system” that actually has nothing to do with the OSMF, is at best disingenuous. That doesn’t help with trust.

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This is a voting system designed for the OSMF board elections.

What do you mean it has nothing to do with the OSMF?

This is not a general-use voting specification.

Don’t roll your own.

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I think there is some misunderstanding. The proposed specification relies only on well-established cryptography protocols (primarily blind signatures and asymmetric cryptography). The application does not “roll it’s own” crypto.

BTW. I don’t really understand your answer in the context of “This is not a general-use voting specification”. Could you clarify?

I would like to cryptographically second this proposal.

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This thread is proof that we need a :popcorn: reaction.

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The Privacy point is basically something that has to be accepted when using a SaaS product. Nobody running a SaaS application is running their own email server and likely will be using some kind of cloud product. Running physical servers makes sense if you’re OSM, but not for a lot of SaaS applications.

And for security, again, welcome to every SaaS voting application, except the alternative of running our own is exactly the same, would you trust voting for an organisation using a platform run by that organisation? I wouldn’t. I’d trust a successful third party more, you wouldn’t survive if you were doctoring results.

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On mobile, wallets come in a form of an application with an embedded web browser. The experience is pretty much similar but with a different interface.

so you would again need to trust that the app version you install on your mobile device would be the same as the one of which you have read the source code.

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In the real world, it usually involves a selected group of people (so there is someone who can see the votes).

everybody can go to watch when the votes are counted, counting the votes is a public act (e.g. in German elections, but likely in any democratic country, although I have not checked it)

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Breaking news: vulnerability found in well-established cryptography protocols.

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I’m always in favor of replacing proprietary software with free software.

But as @woodpeck says -

[…] Personally, while I certainly possess the ability to install a crypto wallet extension into my web browser, I’m not even sure if I would (because I dislike anything to do with cryptocurrency […]

A free software solution that does not involve cryptocurrency would have my support.

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