Blockchain tech, can it improve voting?
My thoughts on this are that there will always be tradeoffs between conveninence and security and security is never absolute. The current voting mechanism has risks to security and new technology is going to bring new risks to security. The reason to experiment with new technology is that it is really the only way long term to evolve voting into something useful for society. By improving the voting technology perhaps democracy itself can be saved but currently the voting mechanism has many weaknesses including the fact that many people don't vote because it's very inconvenient (voter participation isn't very high).
One way this could be implemented is to have a system where every voting machine is a full node on a blockchain. After a voter verifies that their name is on the list of people for that polling place, they could be given a card, similar to a Bitcoin paper wallet, that they insert into a slot on the machine to be scanned. When they do that they are given a certain number of “vote tokens”- one for each candidate or issue on the ballot. Every time they vote on something, a token is sent to an address on the blockchain that corresponds to the choice that they made. Then when the voting is over and the polls close, there would be a permanent record of where all the votes went- and there would be no way for a hostile actor to hack in and change the totals, because to do that they would have to change every record on every machine.
These ideas in my opinion need to be tried out. I think government should fund trials of blockchain improved voting technologies on the small scale local elections and then we can gather data to find out whether or not it's an improvement. Absent doing any trials and tests we don't know and can never know. If we don't experiment we can never improve voting.
- Blockchain tech does not necessarily greatly improve voting security but it does greatly improve convenience.
- Voting is not an easy problem and digitization introduces new risks which don't exist when there is a paper trail. Paper trails and auditing are going to be important to keep and I would suggest the successful systems will be hybrid approaches which simply improve areas of convenience.
very good
Never thought about using the blockchain for voting purposes. Though seen as banks are putting alot of effort and money to creating their own blockchains it will probably happen. Early days yet for the blockchain, there will be many uses - very exciting times.
Times are changing so is the block chain world . Bankers , investors , brokers are all part of it now . @dana-edwards
Voting on a blockchain, interesting. Ignorance will be the biggest hurdle. As the saying goes... Give up liberty for security and you have neither. Steem On!
To me, blockchain voting is an obvious solution and could increase precipitation..although I'm not sure certain parties want that.
Yes, I would think that blockchain technology could make voting a lot more transparent and fair, especially for countries that are known to have questionable systems.
Voting on the blockchain will be really cool.
For use in corporate governance is going to transform how we think about organizational structure.
The Aragon project is an interesting step into this direction.
This is an older post of mine about the steem voting algorithm - quadratic voting for use in corporate or state governance has the ability to really make some waves. Blockchain allows this to be implemented safely.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/your-vote-squared-not-everyone-s-vote-is-equal-insight-into-quadratic-voting-and-why-there-wasn-t-linear-rewards-in-the-first