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The whole setup of blockchain voting ignores the vast economic pressures at play here. Blockchains only work if the payoff for cheating the system is lower than

The whole setup of blockchain voting ignores the vast economic pressures at play here. Blockchains only work if the payoff for cheating the system is lower than the cost of PoS or PoW or whatever consensus mechanism is at play. The issue is that the results of major elections have truly massive economic consequences. A president of the US has a powerful say over trillions of dollars in funding. Meanwhile, total mining revenue for something like Bitcoin is "only" $18 billion per year.

Stevvo 5y ago
No, because if there is a 51% attack, Everyone can see it.
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  At that point, why use miners if you aren't relying on them for security?
  - mariusor 5y ago
    Like I said a little higher in this thread, I don't think that the concept of electronic voting using a blockchain ledger needs to be mapped on the concept of cryptocurrencies. The way I'm thinking this can work is having an organization (the tallier) that creates ledgers for a particular vote (ie, a specific question being asked: Should our city allow construction on Lot A1?) The "voter" can submit a request to participate in this vote in an "enrollment" step. The success of this process leaves the voter with a public/private key that is known to the "tallier" (the public part) and allowed to vote but is not a direct way of identifying the "voter". In the voting period, the above key can be used by the voter to cast a ballot (a yes or a no in the example), the payload of the vote can not be decrypted unless you are the tallier, from the outside you can only see that a particular key has cast a ballot. The tallier can see that one of the enrolled keys has cast the ballot, it decrypts the vote and adds it to the tally. Once the voting ends, the tally is finalized and the ledger is closed and archived. Why does this require blockchain ledgers, you might ask. Because the information in the ledgers, the voting one and the enrollment one need to be public and at the same time tamper proof. If there's another technology that can offer that, maybe it should also be a candidate, but personally I haven't researched enough to know of one. :)
mariusor 5y ago
I think that a lot of people in this thread seem to not realize that blockchain is not just cryptocurrencies. I grant you that the topic of how a voter is allowed to vote is not discussed properly in the article, but I don't see that the assumption is made off hand that you need to own BTC or ETH to do so. My own interpretation of this is that such a voting ledger would be free to participate in and interacting with and, it would be regulated by some mechanism of enrollment based on electronic identification.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  What is the benefit of a permissioned ledger then over a conventional database?
  - mariusor 5y ago
    I replied to this somewhere else in the thread, but the main benefit is the fact that the ledger can be stored publicly, unlike a database. This allows for better transparency and auditing when it comes to how votes get submitted to it. Someone else said that a git repository can be used for a subset of this mechanism also, and I agree mostly agree. So probably a crypto ledger is not the only way to implement a transparent method of electronic voting, but it has a lot of the properties that are required for it.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Databases can be made available publicly. And a permissioned blockchain is controlled by third parties that can control what gets written to it, just like a database. You can have a public database that anyone can download and audit, and that can be rendered effectively immutable via that auditing. Transparency is also problematic for voting records since votes need to be private to prevent coercion. The fact that I don't know how you voted is a security feature that prevents me from threatening you to vote a certain way. And once you've watered down blockchain to mean 'git' then its lost most of its meaning. And why do you need a merkle tree in that case? Why does your data need to branch? Why do you need diffs? Why do you need anything more than a table full of votes? You could do some kind of cyrptographic signing of votes so that it established a cert chain for a given vote, but hid the identity other than perhaps zip code, so then it was auditable that the CA had signed a given number of certs from a zipcode and that a given number of votes had been received from each zipcode so that it was auditable that way, while producing public voting results at a geographical granularity (zipcodes with very small numbers of people might still be a problem). But none of that requires what we consider to be blockchain crypto in this day. You don't even need git, you just need a PKI and some old school 90s era cryptography and a database.

Stevvo 5y ago

No, because if there is a 51% attack, Everyone can see it.

lalaland1125 5y ago
At that point, why use miners if you aren't relying on them for security?
- mariusor 5y ago
  Like I said a little higher in this thread, I don't think that the concept of electronic voting using a blockchain ledger needs to be mapped on the concept of cryptocurrencies. The way I'm thinking this can work is having an organization (the tallier) that creates ledgers for a particular vote (ie, a specific question being asked: Should our city allow construction on Lot A1?) The "voter" can submit a request to participate in this vote in an "enrollment" step. The success of this process leaves the voter with a public/private key that is known to the "tallier" (the public part) and allowed to vote but is not a direct way of identifying the "voter". In the voting period, the above key can be used by the voter to cast a ballot (a yes or a no in the example), the payload of the vote can not be decrypted unless you are the tallier, from the outside you can only see that a particular key has cast a ballot. The tallier can see that one of the enrolled keys has cast the ballot, it decrypts the vote and adds it to the tally. Once the voting ends, the tally is finalized and the ledger is closed and archived. Why does this require blockchain ledgers, you might ask. Because the information in the ledgers, the voting one and the enrollment one need to be public and at the same time tamper proof. If there's another technology that can offer that, maybe it should also be a candidate, but personally I haven't researched enough to know of one. :)

mariusor 5y ago

I think that a lot of people in this thread seem to not realize that blockchain is not just cryptocurrencies. I grant you that the topic of how a voter is allowed to vote is not discussed properly in the article, but I don't see that the assumption is made off hand that you need to own BTC or ETH to do so. My own interpretation of this is that such a voting ledger would be free to participate in and interacting with and, it would be regulated by some mechanism of enrollment based on electronic identification.

lamontcg 5y ago
What is the benefit of a permissioned ledger then over a conventional database?
- mariusor 5y ago
  I replied to this somewhere else in the thread, but the main benefit is the fact that the ledger can be stored publicly, unlike a database. This allows for better transparency and auditing when it comes to how votes get submitted to it. Someone else said that a git repository can be used for a subset of this mechanism also, and I agree mostly agree. So probably a crypto ledger is not the only way to implement a transparent method of electronic voting, but it has a lot of the properties that are required for it.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Databases can be made available publicly. And a permissioned blockchain is controlled by third parties that can control what gets written to it, just like a database. You can have a public database that anyone can download and audit, and that can be rendered effectively immutable via that auditing. Transparency is also problematic for voting records since votes need to be private to prevent coercion. The fact that I don't know how you voted is a security feature that prevents me from threatening you to vote a certain way. And once you've watered down blockchain to mean 'git' then its lost most of its meaning. And why do you need a merkle tree in that case? Why does your data need to branch? Why do you need diffs? Why do you need anything more than a table full of votes? You could do some kind of cyrptographic signing of votes so that it established a cert chain for a given vote, but hid the identity other than perhaps zip code, so then it was auditable that the CA had signed a given number of certs from a zipcode and that a given number of votes had been received from each zipcode so that it was auditable that way, while producing public voting results at a geographical granularity (zipcodes with very small numbers of people might still be a problem). But none of that requires what we consider to be blockchain crypto in this day. You don't even need git, you just need a PKI and some old school 90s era cryptography and a database.