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Honestly we should just have block chain based PUBLIC voting. This article is right about secret internet voting: it’s fundamentally incompatible with unsuperv
by arjunchint 9mo ago
Honestly we should just have block chain based PUBLIC voting.
This article is right about secret internet voting: it’s fundamentally incompatible with unsupervised devices and global networks. But secrecy is the constraint that breaks everything.
If you instead require public, verifiable voting, most of the "unsolved" problems disappear. The core requirement becomes: everyone can independently verify inclusion and correct tallying.
That’s where blockchains are a genuine game-changer:
- They provide a public, append-only, tamper-evident system of record.
- Anyone can recompute the tally from first principles — no trusted servers, no “checker apps,” no special dispute resolution.
- Server compromise or insider attacks stop being catastrophic; fraud becomes immediately visible rather than silently scalable.
- Malware can still affect an individual’s vote, but it can’t secretly change the election at scale — the main failure mode highlighted in this post.
If trust is the goal, opacity is the wrong primitive. The secret ballot is mistaken path solving a non existent and purely theoretical problem of vote buying.
In a world where we expect everything to be easily accessible, the hardships placed by all the steps required to vote (registration, confirming residency location, waiting in line for polling booth) is seriously impacting voter participation. We need to get with the times and modernize this voting infrastructure.
- whimsicalism 9mo agoof course, then you get vote bribing and retaliation. i'm generally in favor of public or provable voting because i think it is the best solution - but you do have to sort of how eyes wide open.
- arjunchint 9mo agoWe are a society of adults and complex individuals that don't need to be moralized to or nanny'ed. You can easily bring up bribing and retaliation as excuses why we shouldn't have jury trials either. These were never really fundamental problems with open democracy, like Andrew Jackson didn't bribe everyone in the country to become president. TBH if a politician offered me $100 to listen to his pitch, I would take it but I would still vote based on the thousands of dollars of lifetime impact of their policies on my income and assets.
- mspecter 9mo agoYou might be interested in some prior work on blockchain voting, it's a bit harder to get right than one might think, and actually introduces some problems [1,2]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/specter https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat... [2] https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyaa025/6137886 https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyaa025/6...
- arjunchint 9mo agoThese sources still presume SECRET blockchain voting as the goal.
- mspecter 9mo agoThe secret ballot is usually considered a core goal of an elections system, blockchain involvement or not.