I don't think there's a way to make a database public in a binary form at scale. Any other format than binary would not represent the real data in my opinion.

I don't think there's a way to make a database public in a binary form at scale. Any other format than binary would not represent the real data in my opinion. Votes need be private only in as much as who is the voter, I replied in post #28976010 with how this would be handled, but the basics would be that there's not a direct way of linking a voter with their public vote. The merkle tree is needed for the same reason as in git, to have a well defined relationship between votes. Branching is for having multiple vote items in the same ledger. Diffs are for auditing. I'm not saying that a blockchain ledger is the definite technology for storing this kind of information, but to me it looks like it has a lot more desired properties than a database. In the end you need blockchain technology to have a chance to sell this to people. If you bundle a certificate authority and a postgres database with a crud interface nobody will be excited by it. The first iteration of this type of software needs not be perfect, it needs not be used for electing the president of the Universe, it is fine if a company uses it for selecting the color of wallpaper for the break room. We need to start doing things in this direction, because the world is getting bigger and the populations grow bigger and paper ballots won't scale forever, and most importantly it could lower the effort for participating in elections to the level that politics can be reimagined into something that resembles a democracy better. [edit: sorry for the pathetic last part, but I feel pretty strongly about this]