
Blockchain based elections would be a disaster for democracy - ChicagoDave
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/blockchain-based-elections-would-be-a-disaster-for-democracy/
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ChicagoDave
I'm not a blockchain nut so I can't be blamed for saying it can be used for
"everything". In fact I'm highly skeptical that currency is its best use case.
But elections are different.

The original poster is forgetting about a proposed infrastructure for such a
system. I'd imagine there'd be federal, state, and local auditors of the
blockchain. This means that every "vote" would be verified by hundreds of
independent auditors in real time and forever. Second, the reporting would be
public. Anyone with access to the blockchain could (and would) be able to
verify their time-stamped and encrypted vote, but they'd also be able to count
all of the votes for any election. So if they wanted to see precinct level
voting totals, they could simply run a query against the blockchain. Same for
municipal, state, and federal elections, along with any other items on the
ballot.

In order to hack such a system, you'd have to circumvent people from using
their identity on a massive scale, something that's just not feasible and if
someone were to attempt it, there would be immediate flags and an immediate
response. (AI does this today in real-time for general phishing and hacking
scenarios - see recent Microsoft article on AI usage).

There'd be no more waiting. There'd be no more damaged ballots. No more lines.
No more polling stations with human intervention and hacking capabilities. No
more voter suppression.

The value of such a system vastly outweighs the original poster's knowledge of
how this would and could be implemented to be safe and vastly superior to what
we have today.

