You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Hey Steemit, can blockchain technology increase voter turnout and participation?
@davidpakman I believe in the long run it could potentially do so. Some common excuses I hear from people who don't vote are "my vote wont make a difference anyway" or "the system is rigged". If the voting system integrated a blockchain it could restore some faith in the voting system in regards to manipulation/hacking. You cant alter what is on a blockchain as it is immutable, and it could potentially be very powerful if used in the voting system.
Although, I do imagine that there are certain governmental factions that will be incredibly invested in ensuring transparency (obviously not exposing individuals and their votes) and availability/accessibility does not come to the voting system. Not while there are rules that can be bent - and not broken - to ensure outcomes can be encouraged in a given direction. Far too much at stake for these individuals in terms of money and influence.
Not that I'm saying I wouldn't want it to happen. It'd be an interesting world if voting got brought up to date.
What's your opinion on distributed verification of blocks? I can see arguments on both sides. If we assume that a vote is a private-key signed 'transaction' then atomically they ought to be pretty secure. In that regard I think that individuals would be unable to create fake votes and so the main concern for a fake-vote attack would be a major organization. I think the best defense against that would then be to allow citizens (verified by another private-key signed login and a government repository of public keys) to verify the blocks in addition to the base government block verification infrastructure. Maybe there could be some kind of tax credit offered to the people who do that.