I agree that blockchains do not solve all of the problems with elections. Here's what blockchain can offer, assuming you have a cryptographic identity mechanism (which has its own problems, of course):
1. Any person can validate that their vote was counted.
2. Any person can validate that their voted counted towards their intended candidate.
3. The collective can validate that no person (i.e. no crypto-id) voted twice.
4. The collective can validate the exact true number of tallied votes (and, e.g. make sure it doesn't exceed the total number of eligible voters).
5. The collective can validate the tallying process. I.e. they can count all the votes on the chain, and themselves reproduce the sums.
That does not address the following:
1. Ensuring that a crypto-id was used by the appropriate person (Although if someone stole your ID, this would likely be discovered by the person it was stolen from, due to previous property #2).
2. Ensuring that a person was not coerced to use their crypto-id against their will.
Which are real problems that I would love to see solutions to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve those first 4 as well.
>> 2. Any person can validate that their voted counted towards their intended candidate.
This is a bad idea even in concept. If anyone can validate their vote went for the candidate of their choice, someone else can force them to perform the same validation for money, under threat of violence, familial ostracism, or whatever really.
I get that you understand there is a problem with coercion here, but it's not just an implementation problem, it's a problem with the concept.
> This is a bad idea even in concept. If anyone can validate their vote went for the candidate of their choice, someone else can force them to perform the same validation for money, under threat of violence, familial ostracism, or whatever really.
I responded to this issue in the previous thread about this. But short answer is: create a verifiable but also deniable scheme.
That’s a proposal, not a proven solution, and it assumes that the chosen algorithm, implementation, and operation are all perfect or it fails open. That’s why you need to look at this as a system rather than a chance to use the current fad: this class of proposal replaces something which is cheap, robust, easy to understand, and fails closes with something complex and unproven which most people would cannot make accurate threat assessments about. There’d have to be a huge win to make up for that and “it costs a lot more and my startup could cash in” doesn’t count.
Goals 1 through 5 are addressable by using election scrutineers[0], without introducing problems 1 and 2.
I like crypto as much as the next person. But the bigger picture means that simpler, dumber systems that rely on lots and lots of humans are more suited to the problem space.
1. Any person can validate that their vote was counted.
2. Any person can validate that their voted counted towards their intended candidate.
3. The collective can validate that no person (i.e. no crypto-id) voted twice.
4. The collective can validate the exact true number of tallied votes (and, e.g. make sure it doesn't exceed the total number of eligible voters).
5. The collective can validate the tallying process. I.e. they can count all the votes on the chain, and themselves reproduce the sums.
That does not address the following:
1. Ensuring that a crypto-id was used by the appropriate person (Although if someone stole your ID, this would likely be discovered by the person it was stolen from, due to previous property #2).
2. Ensuring that a person was not coerced to use their crypto-id against their will.
Which are real problems that I would love to see solutions to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve those first 4 as well.