Davyd05
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 560
Merit: 500


View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
August 27, 2014, 05:54:16 AM



I discussed that topic on reddit a couple of months ago:
Danish political party, Liberal Alliance, will be the first party to use the blockchain for voting internally!

Basically, the main problem of any totally-digital e-voting system is that at some point the voter's choice is stored only inside some piece of equipment, and there is no effective way to make sure that said equipment will not change the vote.   One may think of issuing a receipt that allows the voter to check whether his vote was counted, but there seems to be no practical way of (a) preventing the misuse of that receipt to coerce the voter, and (b) preventing the voter from falsely claiming that his vote was miscounted.

By the way, point (a) rules out voting-from-home right away, no matter how sophisticated the counting system.  Voting must be done in a special location, that is carefully designed and monitored to ensure that no one can see the voter's choice, not even if he wants to reveal it.   EDIT: For the same reason,  the voter must not be allowed to use his own equipment when voting. The equipment must be shared by many voters and must be such that it cannot know who is voting, and cannot leak any information other than the total,  not even the order in which votes were cast.

There may be fairly complicated ways of doing that using cruptography.   If they can be proven to work, that would be great news.  However, I doubt that they will be better in practice than the proven medium-tech solution: besides the electronic counting, ensure a paper record of the vote, that the voter can check and the system cannot change afterwards; store that in a conventional ballot box; and count the paper ballots at the voting place, manually, at the end of voting day.  That is a solution that everybody understands and anyone can help to implement.  Cannot get more decentralized and voter-centric than that...

Moreover, I don't see why it would be a good idea to use the bitcoin protocol and blockchain, rather than a separate special-purpose protocol.   Using the bitcoin blockchain for voting sound like "how can we use a jet engine to make popcorn".  Cheesy

You should ask the voters of Florida how that worked out...also the company DIEBOLD lied when it said you couldn't run a .exe on their tabulation machines...a Swedish computer scientist came to a court hearing for them and ran an .exe that changed the final votes...and still they didn't get a proper re count in Florida.