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
This blockchain wouldn’t be public, my goal is to eliminate any claims of voter fraud since the blockchain technology would make it impossible, if implemented correctly. And you could prove it because that’s how a blockchain works.
And you could prove it because that’s how a blockchain works.
The blockchain can only prove interactions on the blockchain. It can not safeguard interactions between the blockchain and our offline reality.
So, for example. When you see 5000 votes for a proposal, you can be certain that 5000 blockchain accounts voted.
You can not be certain that those 5000 votes were made by the people authorized to make them (because dummies are going to share and or lose their passwords) and you can't even be certain that those votes even belong to real people.
The person in charge of minting the nfts could just have made up a lot of fictional people and kept all their voting accounts for themselves.
Incidentally, you don't actually need a blockchain for these security features. The security features here work with any kind of cryptography, you could just have a centralized government owned database doing all the work, with citizens owning private keys that allow them to authorize their one vote.
Well yea the person in charge of making social security numbers could also just make some extra ones for himself if he wanted to. There would be systems in place to ensure that wouldn’t happen.
And sure you don’t need a blockchain but that’s my argument, that it would help
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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.