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The Impacts of PopVote in Hong Kong
2017 Chief Executive Election Civil Referendum
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OrganisationPresentation
Popvote.hk was created by the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University to run
small-scale e-polls for specific groups or organizations, mid-scale e-polls for specific communities or
sectors, and large-scale civil referendums for the general public.
popvote.hk
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OrganisationPresentation
A group of tech professionals specialising in civic engagement
technologies such as polling chatbots, digital deliberation,
strategic voting predictions and civil referendums, with the aim to
promote democracy and strengthen civic society.
civicdata.hk @HKCivicData /CivicDataHK
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San Francisco based foundation backed by YCombinator and Fast Forward working on decentralized
democracy by implementing blockchain technologies for liquid democracy. Currently working on
Sovereign, a liquid democracy app and on a paper called “The Social
Smart Contract”OrganisationPresentation
democracy.earth @DemocracyEarth /DemocracyEarth
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Local context and history
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Local context : chief executive small circle election
>0.01% of
1200-peopleElection committee
decides
3,7m registered voters
!Civil society considers this athreat for HK’s autonomy as nominated candidates are loyal to Beijing
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2014’s Referendum on universal suffrage
792 808 people participatedThrough mobile app, website and polling stations to decide on alternative way of electing the chief executive. Considered illegal and invalid by China state council.
Winning proposal : allows candidates to be nominated by 35,000 registered voters, or by any political party which secured at least 5% of the vote in the last election for Hong Kong's legislative committee.
Suffered possibly the largest DDoS attack in history
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2017 Chief executive election civil referendum
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Letter of intent
A 2-step process like open primaries
Step 1: Civic nomination
Step 2: Voting
2014 civil referendum
Umbrella Movement
4 month later
If candidate gathers more than
37 790 Votes(1% of registered voters), they are selected for the voting phase.
Polling station
Voting channels
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App design : voting process
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Detected cyber attacks
Attacks targeting organizers email accounts
Attacks targeting polling station wifi
Try to bypass phone certification popvote voting app
DDoS Attacks targeting telegram voting appThousands bots making request at the simultaneaous causing lag
Bypass of phone certification exploit
Interference with wifi signal causing slow connection
SMS interception through SS7 external call attack
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Suspected smear campaign
2017/03/18: Local IT group raised security concerns about Popvote modified version of Telegram Client.
Rumor spread that voters data had been leaked (HK Id card number)Was picked up by national media.
Privacy Commissioner for
Personal Data, Hong Kong
PCPD started to take interest. After asking for a meeting with organizers, Popvote modified Telegram client had to be taken down and be replaced by a Telegram classical chatbot.
This undermined the confidence of public citizens placed in Popvote and didn’t allow for usual high participation.
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PR crisis strategy: transparency about data handling
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Results
65K + citizens took part in the civil referendum
62KVoted against
59KVoted in favor
1KVoted in favor
2,7KVoted against
She got elected by 777 election committee members
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Project Assessment
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Key learning
- A smear campaign can cause more damage than a large DDoS attack
- Should have prepared informational campaigns on the security of new technologies to
address privacy concerns preemptively
- Be ready to handle PR crisis when opponents try to smear your technology
- Might not use Telegram again
- Telegram is harder to hack / attack but it creates a software dependence having to rely
heavily on a trusted third party
- Failed to be adopted by the general public as users had to download a dedicated app.
Also, older generations were not used to interacting with chatbots
- Exposed to opponents creating bots with similar names to confuse users and further
erode their trust in the bot
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Blockchain architecture didn’t get implemented
Crypto login
Decentralized storage
Data anchoring
Voting explorer
Github repo → https://github.com/LucasIsasmendi/r2bot-family
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Exploring how to build a decentralized digital democracy → frama.link/paper
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Thank you for listening !Download slides → https://frama.link/popvote
Let’s keep talking:
democracy.earth
@DemocracyEarth
/DemocracyEarth
/DemocracyEarth
chat.democracy.earth