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.
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.