NotLambchop
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August 28, 2014, 07:20:09 PM

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Well, the whole point of blockchain-based technology is precisely that it takes trust out of the equation completely...

He brought up several interesting points which you might have missed.  I'll try to put them in different wrappers, hopefully not losing the meaning in the process.

1.  Assume a magical black box which, when the "press" button is pressed, prints out the *exact* result of an election.  Also assume that it is the definitive Black Box--while the result is [by definition] invariably correct, no one knows how it works.  It's a hypothetical, accept everything above as a given.
What do you think the odds of such a thing becoming the accepted method of national elections?  

2.  People do not trust technology--they don't understand it.  They do not understand most of modern technology, including simple stuff like ATMs, but they do not need to trust it--they trust the agencies behind it (banks, in case of ATMs).  This may be absurd, but that's how it is.  There is no similar agency backing the blockchain, and Joe Sixpack has a natural distrust of eggheads.

3.  Recounts.  There is little to suggest that a recount in conventional elections would produce results more accurate than the initial tallying.  But it makes people feel better.  Those tangible slips of paper, as ridiculous and flawed as they are, are used even when a purely digital apparatus recording choices directly from a keyboard to electronic storage (like a hugely-redundant RAID or something) would be cheaper, more convenient, and [provably] more reliable.  Go figure, but that's how it is.