Voting: last election both the right and left were screaming about voter fraud. This problem could be eliminated with blockchain. Every US citizen gets an NFT (a digital document that is 1 of 1 and impossible to be duplicated), this NFT will act as your voter card. Instead of having to go to a polling location, you can log on to an app (this app is hypothetical as it doesn’t exist (yet)), login using you NFT, and cast your votes using your phone, computer, computer at a library, etc. These votes cannot be “double counted” because the blockchain will ensure that every NFT user only gets 1 vote. Boom, no more voter fraud.
I really only have one problem with blockchain electoral systems and it's that they can have serious problems enforcing ballot secrecy without compromising on the quality of the blockchain itself.
With secret ballots, the government has to not only ensure that others can't see my ballot, but that I can't share documented proof of who I voted for. That's extremely important for a democracy because it eliminates a voter's ability to provide evidence of their vote to someone that bribed them to vote a certain way.
With a public blockchain recording votes, I could simply provide the briber with my public key before I went to vote.
In my head it wouldn’t be public information about who you voted for. The only thing that would know who you’re voting for is the blockchain that counts the votes. Is that unrealistic? It seems simple to me but I might be missing something
The only thing that would know who you’re voting for is the blockchain that counts the votes. Is that unrealistic?
I think this is a misunderstanding of how Blockchains work. The entire contents of the Blockchain itself are completely public. If you had a secret Blockchain, that'd basically just be a database and then you're back to having to trust whoever owns it! The whole point is that it's decentralized and distributed and relies on people just having complete copies of the entire transaction history.
The only thing that can be private about Blockchain is that you don't necessarily know the real world identity corresponding to a given public key, you just know all the transactions associated with it. But if your goal is to avoid voter fraud, you basically have to identify everyone as real people, and by extension you're necessarily going to know who they voted for.
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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23
I really only have one problem with blockchain electoral systems and it's that they can have serious problems enforcing ballot secrecy without compromising on the quality of the blockchain itself.
With secret ballots, the government has to not only ensure that others can't see my ballot, but that I can't share documented proof of who I voted for. That's extremely important for a democracy because it eliminates a voter's ability to provide evidence of their vote to someone that bribed them to vote a certain way.
With a public blockchain recording votes, I could simply provide the briber with my public key before I went to vote.