The Impacts of PopVote in Hong Kong

2017 Chief Executive Election Civil Referendum

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

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

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

Local context and history

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

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

2017 Chief executive election civil referendum

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

App design : voting process

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

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.

PR crisis strategy: transparency about data handling

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

Project Assessment

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

Blockchain architecture didn’t get implemented

Crypto login

Decentralized storage

Data anchoring

Voting explorer

Github repo → https://github.com/LucasIsasmendi/r2bot-family

Exploring how to build a decentralized digital democracy → frama.link/paper

Thank you for listening !Download slides → https://frama.link/popvote

Let’s keep talking:

@virgiledevillevir@democracy.earth

democracy.earth

@DemocracyEarth

/DemocracyEarth

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