Or you could just stick to proved, simple reforms that have been introduced in Australia over the last century or so.
Cryptography is powerful, but it tends to be on such an absurdly higher level of assurance inside its narrow applications that it becomes very attractive to try to stuff everything into it, whether or not that's warranted or useful.
Democratic legitimacy comes from the volume of participating individuals who trust and understand the system. Paper ballots are easily understood, independent electoral commissions improve trustworthiness, election scrutineers ensure every room has mutually suspicious observers highly motivated to detect problems, compulsory voting helps ensure the median voter dominates policy and preferential voting helps prevent minority candidates from inverting majority preferences against bad candidates.
None of these require a blockchain. It is a distraction from the actual reforms that will make the important differences.
Fair enough, I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot. The way OP worded his response made it seem like paper was the most secure end all be all solution. If there are other reforms in place I might agree.
The thing is that as technologists, we see a software solution in every shadow. Sometimes software is the wrong solution, taking account of all the needs in hand.
The kind of electoral systems most of us want requires both ballot secrecy and a trustworthy count. Pure software ballots don't achieve that. Paper ballots don't categorically achieve it either, but it's much harder to violate either of the secrecy or count requirements because paper is bulky and the watching eyeballs are numerous. In practical terms: paper ballots can be made to work. I'm from a country where they do.
A blockchain system either works on a public chain, meaning I can sell my vote, or it uses a zero-proof scheme. The zero-proof schemes I'm aware of require someone, somewhere, to seed the chain with a private key. Then we're all just supposed to hope they deleted the one set of bits that can untraceably edit everybody's history. They pinky-swear they'll do it. But there's no way to prove they did, which rather sours the blockchain-can-prove-anything story.
Not to mention the problem that they allow retrieval. Sure, you can't prove that I ever owned a particular ballot. But I can retrieve an identical ballot. That might work for evading money laundering charges but it still kinda fits the vote-selling usecase.
It drives me nuts because this our love of reinvention and our fondness for assuming we can solve everything from first principles as if nobody's thought of these problems before. These problems are already solved in a simple, scalable, subversion-resistant way that everyone can understand. All we have to do is accept that, for once, our profession was not required to interrupt everyone else to give our opinion.
> I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot.
I am being dead serious and I'm not trying to antagonize you here: the fact that you responded and seemed to have a firm opinion on an area you admit you aren't well versed in... well that to me is a huge problem with the way democracy works. It's a trait that we complain about when non-nerd voters vote in uninformed ways on technology and science issues. Blockchain isn't going to solve that.
Better educated voters will do a lot more to improve democracy than blockchain will.
We can't even get reasonable technology choices for the evoting approaches we've tried (we can't even get vendor transparency), and that's not for lack of good proposals for evoting systems over the years. It's because the people choosing the technology don't understand it super well, and are often in the pockets of the vendors.
In practice, it feels like paper ballots are a much better solution than most of the evoting systems we use in the real world currently, and paper ballots certainly feel better to me than any of the completely nebulous "but what about blockchain?" proposals here and elsewhere.
to anyone still harping on blockchain, can you give a detailed description of a realistic threat model where it performs better than paper ballots.
>>> I still think it's worth investigating if this is more secure than plain old paper ballots.
I would agree with that general sentiment, but the overwhelming evidence right now points to "no", IMO.
i will also say, the thing that you're doing that i'm complaining about is a thing that programmers do a lot, and is a thing that i'm plenty guilty of myself (thinking everything is more solvable than it is because you can envision rough pseudocode or systems diagrams for it in your head). this is a thing i'm really trying to get better about not doing.
Cryptography is powerful, but it tends to be on such an absurdly higher level of assurance inside its narrow applications that it becomes very attractive to try to stuff everything into it, whether or not that's warranted or useful.
Democratic legitimacy comes from the volume of participating individuals who trust and understand the system. Paper ballots are easily understood, independent electoral commissions improve trustworthiness, election scrutineers ensure every room has mutually suspicious observers highly motivated to detect problems, compulsory voting helps ensure the median voter dominates policy and preferential voting helps prevent minority candidates from inverting majority preferences against bad candidates.
None of these require a blockchain. It is a distraction from the actual reforms that will make the important differences.