FOR EVERY TECHNOLOGY WE USE TODAY, THERE WAS A TIME IT WAS LAUGHABLY INADEQUATE AS A REPLACEMENT FOR WHAT CAME BEFORE.
Eventually, as a society the our voting will be done on decentralized networks and the results will be usable by trustless programs. Since then, we have implemented what we spoke about. You can see the open source code on GitHub and a deeper explanation here.
I wanted to start this topic to see if we can discuss the implications of on-chain voting and decision making for communities. Lowering the cost of running a poll or election can empower people to make all kinds of decisions, about values that can be used on-chain. Take a look at the last three slides of this presentation about community currencies, and maybe we can make something similar about governance:
Two things come to mind about the idea of using blockchain for identities or voting the first is wallet security, how can we guarantee people’s wallets are safe that they vote with. People lose wallets to scammers everyday, and therefore they would lose their identity, people would even be able to vote on their behalf.
And secondly, privacy, if my public wallet is now being used for voting that means every vote I have ever made would be public as well. This might cause people to vote differently or less often. I agree blockchain voting solves a lot of problems that our current system has, but I think technology needs to come a long way before our wallets are ready to be responsible for all of that.
I see your point here. It is true and it won’t be easy but no big changes have been easy to implement including the internet. It will be one step at a time on the right direction.
To be honest, I do not trust paper ballots, I think they aren’t safe enough and they are also very easy to manipulate. We have seen many times that they fail, I think we really need a safer choice than paper ballots.
Before we try to implement any solution I think it’s important to take a step back and diagnose the problem correctly first. We need to figure out where the sources of error come from in an election first. Paper ballots can be a source of error in 2 ways — the people filling out the ballot can make a mistake, or the people tallying the ballot can make a mistake. Nowadays we feed ballots into machines, and the machine counts it – seems to remove human tallying error sufficiently to me. Even in contentious elections like the 2020, we saw the resilience of our institutions – every big third party organization agreed there was no fraud. So it seems in the US, our problems are not so big. Leaked voter records is a data privacy issue – I don’t see how it has any effect on the result of the election And as to the merkle trees – the small targets in swing counties are VERY juicy targets to subvert, and exactly where the meat of the problem is. We have problems with small swing counties influencing huge political outcomes. In your own example of 2000 election, the florida margin was barely 500 votes for instance. So I think we have to do more research and better understand the problems first
Norman, you make a good point. I don’t think it’s just about errors, though. It’s about confidence in having your result counted.
Merkle Trees have a very good way of checking whether your vote was included: just check the Merkle branch. You can be sure that it was included in the final result.
The remaining questions are whether:
People were disenfranchised (weren’t able to vote)
People had multiple accounts
The user interface lied to the users, and didn’t record their vote faithfully
Well, we know that blockchain scammers are everywhere and for that reason people lose their wallets. So that’s why having secure elections are very important!!
Also, I think that we’re not ready to use public wallets for voting. It’s a lack of privacy. So for sure technology needs to be improved before the wallets can be used for voting.
Well what were doing now is not working. I’m aware that blockchain is the answer. Building a trusted solution that allows accessibility, transparency, and privacy will empower and change our world.
The answer is we need to look at the places where elections are really insecure and constantly have problems. That’s not in the US. Where it does happen, the problems in elections tend to come from voter intimidation, poll violence, and disenfranchisement. Basically, I think the big problems with elections come from the steps leading up to the ballot box – once the ballot is in the box, the problems are small (at least in the US). But before the ballot is in the box, we have problems such as: gerrymandering, abusive voter ID laws, inconvenience of voting, and sometimes voter intimidation. I think having digital elections can solve a lot of these problems – if you can vote on your phone, then nobody can intimidate you into not voting. And I think you also solve voter ID problems/arguments too. So perhaps that’s where blockchain can come in.
@Greg_Magarshak it’s one of my favourite articles of yours and I would like to invite @philip_rhoades to express his opinion here after reading it as it looks like he had a very interesting conversation with his friend the LM of Sydney.
Also, I think that in this video you professionally explained the most important points of it
Here are some new ideas and views about general identity issues and how we can implement some of them on Web3. Back in January 2022, famous Vitalik Buterin wrote a very interesting post about a feature of the World of Warcraft game - soulbound items that once picked up, cannot be transferred or sold to another player.
You can read the full article
I like the idea of Soulbound Tokens that each person can have ONLY a single NFT to which different groups would be able to post important information about them. Perhaps some kind of a new type of ID card on the blockchain that evolves over time. The article meanders a bit further into how you’ll protect your Soulbound NFT from being stolen and how you’ll recover access if you lose your keys.
This article from Defiant summarizes all the main points if you want more.
