Why not run a parallel election to see how close the results are to the old way? If we can make a big splash on social media about a parallel election and be able to show real-time stats not dependent on any outside sources for results. Shed some light on the truth! Then the 2024 election is ours for the taking!
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That’s a great idea. I’ve long wondered why no one has yet done it. Exit polls often show different results than official ballot counts. I have serious doubts about the integrity of our balloting process–who is allowed to register and vote, how accurate the count is, how accurate the reports are, etc.
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Love that idea. @daniel_o_boyle you should post here more regularly.
One of the applications of Intercoin’s platform is to power elections for communities of any size. We have a thread on this forum about it and also an article in CoinDesk. Once you ensure you have one account per community member, you can implement UBI, elections, and other democratic mechanisms.
I know there are prediction markets, that run alongside elections and other things, and I wonder how well they predict the ultimate results. They require “skin in the game” in terms of money, and basically it’s vote (wager) per dollar. In order for an election to work democratically, there has to be one vote per person. Communities can ensure that each person has only one account, similarly to how they do voter registration now. It’s not a perfect process, but we are always told that voter fraud is rare in US elections.
When Lawrence Lessig ran back in 2015, I wrote a small article arguing that polling is better than voting, at least because it avoids problems with voter turnout. For example, 20% of Puerto Rico votes in an election where the majority wants to join the US. What can we do with that?
Crypto is in a unique position to help remove the trust placed in polling organizations to ensure the representative sample was really random, or vote tallying to ensure that every vote was correctly counted. This removal of trust has only recently become possible with technology, but we have long had systems where mutually distrusting parties oversaw each other’s activity at all levels of collation.
This is an exciting time, and we have an opportunity help communities build an end-to-end solution for elections and governance, without having to trust anybody in particular. Do you see ways to get it done without the help of real world communities, though?