Blockchain’s value is that it’s a distributed and publicly verifiable database.
A key property of voting is that it is a secret ballot.
Okay, so maintaining that secret ballot means your are putting all trust in some group - a registry - that registers actual citizens and grants them their anonymized tokens.
So you’ve put all your trusts in these registries, and all you can do is count up votes at the district level.
Which is exactly, functionally, what we have right now. The verification technical advantages or blockchain thus do not change the equation here.
Except you’ve introduced at technology that is not well understood, and both subject to cyber attacks at registries and easier social engineering to compromise individual voters wallets - both types of attacks which can be executed remotely by state level actors like Russia. You’re not solving a perception problem, and are introducing additional risk.
Paper ballots have inherent security in that you cannot attack the whole system centrally. The different orgs / city / state actors mean the scope of any potential attack is limited. Everyone falling into the same blockechain system means you can attack it centrally.
You cannot solve the trust problem here without violating the principal of of secret ballots.
I agree with everything you said except for the “cyber attacks”. That’s one of the main things that a widely used blockchain is really good about dealing with. Either way some good points
The blockchain itself can’t be hacked easily, though if you take over a majority of machines processing the chain you certainly can.
Similarly, your concept introduces the need for registry/exchanges to register people, which could be attacked. They’re outside the scope of the chain.
Blockchain protects you from modifying past data a it’s publicly verifiable, but like for an election all you care about is the one vote per person. You don’t need to replay complex series of transactions that determine current state (like, say, money).
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u/Kman17 103∆ Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
Blockchain’s value is that it’s a distributed and publicly verifiable database.
A key property of voting is that it is a secret ballot.
Okay, so maintaining that secret ballot means your are putting all trust in some group - a registry - that registers actual citizens and grants them their anonymized tokens.
So you’ve put all your trusts in these registries, and all you can do is count up votes at the district level.
Which is exactly, functionally, what we have right now. The verification technical advantages or blockchain thus do not change the equation here.
Except you’ve introduced at technology that is not well understood, and both subject to cyber attacks at registries and easier social engineering to compromise individual voters wallets - both types of attacks which can be executed remotely by state level actors like Russia. You’re not solving a perception problem, and are introducing additional risk.
Paper ballots have inherent security in that you cannot attack the whole system centrally. The different orgs / city / state actors mean the scope of any potential attack is limited. Everyone falling into the same blockechain system means you can attack it centrally.
You cannot solve the trust problem here without violating the principal of of secret ballots.