Would you like to participate in a blockchain voting experiment/trial?

POLL QUESTION:
Would you like to participate in a blockchain voting experiment/trial?
Do you think blockchain voting is a good idea/should be further explored for implementation in our elections?

It would not be without effort, or cost, but I could set up a blockchain vote that us DP members could participate in, so you real people can gain first hand experience. Their is no learning like doing, especially in crypto.
It sounds so complicated until you just do it..


https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/blockchain-technology-key-secure-online-voting-1435443899
There are,** however, increasing examples of political organizations and technology startups experimenting with secure digital voting systems based on the use of Bitcoin’s blockchain technology. Last year Denmark’s Liberal Alliance became the first political party to vote using a blockchain-based system for its internal elections. Similar systems have since been adopted in Norway and Spain and the movement is gathering momentum in the United States.“There is a common misconception that voting cannot be done online in a secure way. However, the introduction of blockchain technology is changing the conversation,” Adam Ernest, CEO of Virginia-based FollowMyVote – an organization committed to developing an online open source, transparent voting platform – explains.Just as Bitcoin users make transactions by sending the digital currency to the recipient’s digital wallet, blockchain voting systems involve creating wallets for each candidate or option in an election. All voters are then allocated a digital "coin" that represents one vote, which they can cast by sending their "coin" to the wallet of their choice.As in a bitcoin transaction, the entire process is recorded in the blockchain public ledger, meaning that unlike most current elections, a voter can verify that his or her vote was actually counted.


Democratic and efficient: Is blockchain voting our future? | Coinfox
Blockchain voting is a dream shared by many, libertarians and bitcoiners alike. Ideology aside, blockchain voting is safe, transparent and cheap. It also seems to be inevitable.

As the US presidential primaries run their course, the US electoral system and the use of electronic voting machines are once again the focus of public criticism.

“Until the codes are open-sourced, there should be no electronic voting machines. Allowing private companies to count our votes with secret programs is just stupid as well as anti-democratic. Paper card stock ballots that are counted by machine are okay, since they can be hand counted to verify the machine count accuracy in close races.”

“Older machines can also have serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today. For example, Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to record voting data or inject malicious data.

Smaller problems can also shake public confidence. Several election officials mentioned “flipped votes” on touch screen machines, where a voter touches the name of one candidate, but the machine registers it as a selection for another.”

“It would be possible to see how many votes were cast, voters could verify that their own votes were counted, and the decentralized network would be the best answer so far to hacking attempts. Combined with the political thought that's gone into systems like Liquid Feedback, there's a starting point here for putting political questions to the public much more frequently and ambitiously,”

Counterwallet: Vote with Tokens | Counterparty
Verifiable Voting with Tokens

Counterparty supports voting through user-created tokens, as well as broadcasting information onto the Bitcoin blockchain. This means that you can post the terms and options of your vote as a broadcast, and let users vote on its outcome with full transparency by using tokens.




Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize liberty in many many ways, currency and voting are just 2 examples of many..

As I see it, the safest, most reliable and theft-proof voting system is that which is least high-tech: a pencil and a paper. Marked in a closed booth. Placed in an blank envelope, which is then placed by a polling official in a locked steel box.

The entire process --- from inspection, before the polling station is opened, of the box through to the counting of votes --- is carried out under the close inspection of assigned representatives of each candidate ("scrutineers" as they're called in Canada) who can challenge anything that seems fishy.

This fatal fascination in the US with voting machines is, well, fatal. Kiss Democacy Good-Bye.

Nono said:

As I see it, the safest, most reliable and theft-proof voting system is that which is least high-tech: a pencil and a paper. Marked in a closed booth. Placed in an blank envelope, which is then placed by a polling official in a locked steel box.

The entire process --- from inspection, before the polling station is opened, of the box through to the counting of votes --- is carried out under the close inspection of assigned representatives of each candidate ("scrutineers" as they're called in Canada) who can challenge anything that seems fishy.

This fatal fascination in the US with voting machines is, well, fatal. Kiss Democacy Good-Bye.

Click to expand...

With blockchain, all of the votes are counted as they enter the box and recorded on an immutable public ledger instantaneously..

So even if I owned the box and could take votes out, put votes in, change votes, whatever, the initial record of them being cast in the first place is still there for all to see, additional changes would just be further actions upon existing actions, which is how blockchain works as standard..

The ledger is not a list of who owns what, it is a list of who sent what to who, always traceable all the way back to the creation of the token itself.. At times not identity traceable, but existence traceable.. Pretty much you prove that you have something to give by citing the last 1,000 times that something ha changed hands all the way back to its genesis..

So once you cast a vote or send a transaction, that record is there and immutable.. Any changes would only be additional actions compounding on the last..

How secure? After 20 minutes it would take supercomputers consuming the equivalent electricity of all of Germany to go back and rewrite history..

private polls suck. whoever says this is a stupid idea is a luddite

The fundamental problem with electronic voting is being able to retain ones anonymity. Eventually it would lead to abuses in which campaigns know for certain how one votes.

Blockchain's a potentially revolutionary technology but it ain't there yet. For one thing there's no guarantee that it's going to scale the way you would need to record one hundred million votes.

More revolutionary would be it's use as a means of making government records - like land deeds - public. I went to a block chain presentation, my organization is fielding a technology demonstrator using blockchain, and was amazed to find that in most of the world land deeds are often forged or outright stolen. In much of the world if you want your neighbor's house seems all you need to do is grease the palm of the local land-deed guy.

The problem with all of these voting methods is that they all assume the honesty of those counting the votes and recording the results. In a paper voting system, the counters can easily take out votes they don't like and replace them with ballots that they do. In electronic voting systems, the software can be tweaked to say anything the vote-counters want it to say. Even in a blockchain system, if you see that the system records your votes properly, that doesn't mean they can't be changed down the line. Plus none of these systems scale up well. With 100 votes it isn't hard to go verify with each voter what they voted. It isn't that easy when you have 100 million votes.

Gaius46 said:

For one thing there's no guarantee that it's going to scale the way you would need to record one hundred million votes.

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True, but this topic is actually THE current highest priority of development. All the latest drama is all just about how to accomplish this goal, as their are many different ways to make it happen, the massive debate is about which to go for..

It is possible on other blockchains, but they do not have the extremely huge network securing them like Bitcoin does, so they could be hacked with the amount of electricity much smaller than that currently used by Germany, possibly withing the realm of the NSA supercomputers..

I'm a proponent of block chain technology. I just don't see it earning the confidence of most people because there is a learning curve to it. To many people it will seem like black box technology.

You have to remember that the average person feels safer using their credit card in person than inputting their credit card information online despite the encryption.

Cephus said:

Even in a blockchain system, if you see that the system records your votes properly, that doesn't mean they can't be changed down the line.

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Yes it does, the action of casting the vote itself is what is recorded on the blockchain ledger. Any changes to that would not effect the innitial records but rather just create more records on top of the casting records..

Say you have a roll of reciept tape.. Long paper..
You start writing at the top that you created 100 tokens..
Next you write that you gave 10 people each 5 tokens..
Then you write that those 10 people gave whatever amount of tokens to the next person, and on and on..
You always keep writing in more changes, and you can proove all the way back to the beggining that those changes are legit based on all past transactions tracing that token back to it's first creation..

Eventually you have 10k miles of transactions list, and a computer can prove them all the way back to the beginning instantly and that the record has not been altered due to taking cryptographic hashes of the lists history.

The ledger is updated every 10 minutes with new transactions, never change the old information, always adding new..

Cephus said:

With 100 votes it isn't hard to go verify with each voter what they voted. It isn't that easy when you have 100 million votes.

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It doesn't matter how many thier are if you know which vote is your own and can check it on the public ledger.. Every one is 100% unique, their are more possibilities for unique addresses than computers could make using the entire the energy from the sun for the sun's entire life..

It is all about massive numbers, actually the number of possible unique addresses is 2^160 = 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976..

Orly? said:

It doesn't matter how many thier are if you know which vote is your own and can check it on the public ledger.. Every one is 100% unique, their are more possibilities for unique addresses than computers could make using the entire the energy from the sun for the sun's entire life..

It is all about massive numbers, actually the number of possible unique addresses is 2^160 = 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976..

Click to expand...

That assumes that people are going to care enough to check their votes, but it doesn't alter the problem. Even if every single vote is recorded properly, that doesn't mean that in aggregate, the votes will add up. Again, you have to be able to trust the vote counters and the vote counting software and if you can't, and I can't think of a system where you, as an individual, could ever find out for sure, the whole thing is moot.

If you want to see how the blockchain ledger works go here https://blockchain.info/ and starting clicking on addresses that look like this - 1BoQvbaziBWHGX76Bu9f5JPn1fbE7H5W9W

See how you can trace them all the way back to where they came from and all the way forward to where they are now..

Note: Sites like that just read or interpret the blockchain ledger for you and make it easy to search through, they are not THE blockchian, or the keepers of the blockchain.. Like a search engine sorta.. Live stream including all history..

Cephus said:

That assumes that people are going to care enough to check their votes, but it doesn't alter the problem. Even if every single vote is recorded properly, that doesn't mean that in aggregate, the votes will add up. Again, you have to be able to trust the vote counters and the vote counting software and if you can't, and I can't think of a system where you, as an individual, could ever find out for sure, the whole thing is moot.

Click to expand...

You can just look at total inputs.. Total outputs are moot.. Total inputs are the amount of votes cast to that option, other options would be a different address with total inputs to that address..

example

Inputs and Outputs
Total Input 0.51274497 BTC
Total Output 0.51259807 BTC
https://blockchain.info/tx/a762f34e7c1c4516d86d20395f916e0a37e3628d7ff522c69a55a7a327f265ae



No one has to count or record anything.. Blockchain technology is pretty much the epitome of counting and recording technology, that is what it does so revolutionaraly..
That is what it does and also provides immutability security, which means that all previous counts and records cannot be changed ever ever..

The scailing problem is all about how much data of records we can actually keep based on the size of storage that is required to store all previous history, it is based on storing all previous history..


This chart is the size in MB storage used currently to store the entire transaction history of bitcoin, whole thing, no exceptions, record of every last transaction ever..

The current focus is storing the entire history in a more compressed mannor, and/or raising the limits of how much new dada is allowed every 10 minutes..

It is being kept small so the average person all over the world can maintain their own copy of the ledger and constantly check their ledger copy against the network at all times.. 100s of thousands of copies of the ledger, distributed security..

If it gets to big faster than advancement in HDD storage capacity keep up then it will become out of reach for the average joe to maintain his own copy.. The big deal is keeping the ability to provide security to the network in the hands of the average joe rather than to have it centralize around corporate databases, maintain a very low barrier of entry..

92 gigs is not a big deal now, just takes a bit to download the first time you do it if you want to be part of providing network security, which their is no current lack of or threat of lack..

Cephus said:

That assumes that people are going to care enough to check their votes, but it doesn't alter the problem.

Click to expand...

They don't have to but it's easy.. Every voter gets a number like this 12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx

And then you can just search here https://blockchain.info for 12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx and see everything that it has ever done, and what is then done with everything it has ever by everyone in the future, had and where everything it ever got came from in the entire history of everything..

https://blockchain.info/address/12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx
Transactions
No. Transactions 297

Total Received 35.29182156 BTC

Final Balance 0.016758 BTC

-

total received - total sent = current balance..

That means total received since the dawn of time minus total sent since the dawn of time.. All history, and live updates..

Orly? said:

They don't have to but it's easy.. Every voter gets a number like this 12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx

And then you can just search here https://blockchain.info for 12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx and see everything that it has ever done, and what is then done with everything it has ever by everyone in the future, had and where everything it ever got came from in the entire history of everything..

https://blockchain.info/address/12r6tAZQKvV1wJmyCCiW1DtoufZAseHXhx
Transactions
No. Transactions 297

Total Received 35.29182156 BTC

Final Balance 0.016758 BTC

-

total received - total sent = current balance..

That means total received since the dawn of time minus total sent since the dawn of time.. All history, and live updates..

Click to expand...

I understand how it works, I just don't think it will matter. Nobody has access to anyone's vote but their own. When the collective vote comes out, they have no means of determining if all of the votes were counted correctly. In fact, they have no means of determining if their own vote was counted correctly. You keep asserting that they will be but you have no means of proving that it's actually so. You're trusting the system but you have no way of demonstrating that said trust is actually justified. All vote counting systems have the same weakness, that the people who count, or the people who program the method of counting, have to be trustworthy and that ain't necessarily the case.

Cephus said:

In a paper voting system, the counters can easily take out votes they don't like and replace them with ballots that they do. In electronic voting systems, the software can be tweaked to say anything the vote-counters want it to say.

Click to expand...

Not if they're being watched hawklike by representatives of each candidate they can't.

Even in a blockchain system, if you see that the system records your votes properly, that doesn't mean they can't be changed down the line.

Click to expand...

Or 'up the line', showing you what you want to see but otherwise being buggered.

To me, any gizmo at all is inherently buggerable. The only solution is something so simple and low-tech a four-year-old can understand it. A hundred million voters? Hey, you print a hundred million ballots (all of which can be inspected by the various scrutineers) and off you go.

Gadgetry is ultimately falsifiable.

Nono said:

Not if they're being watched hawklike by representatives of each candidate they can't.

Click to expand...

But how do you do that? And what if the representatives of one candidate is involved? And especially with code, do you let the candidates crawl through the code themselves? What if one side is sneakier than the other? There is no system that is safer than the people involved are.

Or 'up the line', showing you what you want to see but otherwise being buggered.

To me, any gizmo at all is inherently buggerable. The only solution is something so simple and low-tech a four-year-old can understand it. A hundred million voters? Hey, you print a hundred million ballots (all of which can be inspected by the various scrutineers) and off you go.

Gadgetry is ultimately falsifiable.

Click to expand...

Anything is inherently falsifiable. And as an individual voter, no system is inherently better than any other, which is what the OP is saying. I don't buy it. As an individual voter, even if you can check out what you voted, that doesn't prove a thing. Say you have a million voters in your state, just to keep the numbers easy. Even if all one million voters can and do check out their individual votes, that proves nothing about what comes out the other end because no one has access to the whole of the voting record, as well as the individual voters, but the people running the election. And if they are dishonest, they can manipulate the numbers any way that they please. You have to trust that they are being honest. And even if you have people watching the people running the election, you have to trust that the people watching aren't dishonest. Any election is only as honest as those who have the means to manipulate it.

Cephus said:

But how do you do that? And what if the representatives of one candidate is involved?

Click to expand...

I acted several times as a scrutineer in Canada. I'll describe it.

Say the polls open at 8 a.m. So the official running the polling station (who has an assistant) meets there at 7.30 with the various duly accredited scrutineers. He has enough ballots for everyone on the rolls to vote if they show up. You can inspect them, count them, whatever. (They are black, with the name and affiliation of each candidate printed in white, with a white circle beside the name.) There is a corresponding number of blank envelopes.

There's also a steel box with a hinged top, in which is a simple rectangular hole slightly wider than the envelope. Everyone is free to inspect the box (no false bottoms, whatever). The box is then closed and padlocked.

Poll opens, people come in. Each voter receives a ballot and an envelope from the polling official, with oral instructions. (Written instructions on the wall of the booth.)
This entire process is watched by the scrutineers.

The voter goes into the booth (where there's a pencil on a string) and returns with a sealed envelope. The official places it in the box, with everyone watching.

When the poll closes, everyone sits down with the official at a rectangular table. He opens the box and takes out the envelopes, all identical. He tips the box over so everyone can see it's empty. Anyone who wants to stick his hand in and feel around is welcome.

Then -- one by one -- the envelopes are opened and the contents removed. Each vote is counted individually. The official keeps a tally on a board on the wall. Each scrutineer can keep his own tally.

The scrutineer is empowered to challenge the validity of a ballot. Some ballots are spoiled (two or more candidates are voted for). Whatever. There is rarely any real disagreement, but scope for it is built into the system. If you're a scrutineer and you feel that an invalid ballot has been accepted, you can challenge it. It has to be put aside in a large envelope that will ultimately go into the box with the rest.

At the end of the process, all votes have been counted in the presence of a representative of each candidate. In 99.999% of cases there is agreement about the result.

The boxes and their contents are kept (verifiably) at a central location until the election is certified. In the event of a close result, recounts are routinely carried out. If things get really hairy, there's something called a "judicial recount". (Judges in Canada are civil servants, not themselves elected).

Each scrutineer then contacts local party headquarters and conveys the result from that polling station. The result is perfectly public and anyone can keep a tally.

You say that "anything is inherently falsifiable". OK, but it beats me how any shenanigans could occur in the system described above.

The key? Low tech. Everything depends completely on the participants' senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc.).

Again, I simply do not comprehend the American fascination with gizmos of any kind. But it's there, and we've seen some humdingers of questionable elections in recent years.

I guess you don't understand.. Voting on the blockchain is the same as any other blockchain transaction..

Cephus said:

I understand how it works, I just don't think it will matter.
Nobody has access to anyone's vote but their own.
Unless they published what names are related to what keys/numbers, or gave that information to a commitee to oversee
When the collective vote comes out, they have no means of determining if all of the votes were counted correctly.
Their is no counting.. Votes for one go to one address, votes for another go to another address.. The amount of votes that came in are the count, that simple.. You can just look at the candidates address total.. They can also be proven burn addresses, which means no one has control of the private key.. Like Bitcoin Address 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
In fact, they have no means of determining if their own vote was counted correctly.
You can see that your transaction went to the address you specified and confirm the address specified has the balance of the transaction..
You keep asserting that they will be but you have no means of proving that it's actually so.
It already is so, it already is what I'm telling you.. I'm not descriming some system that doesn't exist, it exists and is proven..
You're trusting the system but you have no way of demonstrating that said trust is actually justified.
Millions and billions of $ worth of value is transferred over this system every day.. 1-3 million BTC per day or about $750,000,000 to $2,250,000,000 per day.. One day was $34,500,000,000 ... 35 billion, 1 day, pretty safe
All vote counting systems have the same weakness, that the people who count, or the people who program the method of counting, have to be trustworthy and that ain't necessarily the case.
Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin has proven to be safe and reliable dealing with extremely high value transactions, vote counting is the same as determining an addresses balance and it is 100% reliable.

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You don't need any person to count the balance of your BTC wallet, it is what it is and can be verified in blockchain history.. Eliminates all human error..

Nono said:

Or 'up the line', showing you what you want to see but otherwise being buggered.

To me, any gizmo at all is inherently buggerable. The only solution is something so simple and low-tech a four-year-old can understand it. A hundred million voters? Hey, you print a hundred million ballots (all of which can be inspected by the various scrutineers) and off you go.

Gadgetry is ultimately falsifiable.

Click to expand...

Once transactions on a blockchain are cast they are cast and their is NO undoing them never ever impossible it would take... Ugh..

No no one could ever change it upstream or downstream..

4 year old can understand.. Register to vote and register your key, make a key here https://www.bitaddress.org/ or on a thousand different kinds of opensource software..
When it's time to vote election officials send all of the people's keys tokens related to specific elections.. 1 for reps one for pres etc.

To vote you send your token to the address of whatever you want to vote for, the end..

All votes from citizens address to the parties addresses will be on the blockchain and can never never never be changed.. Their will be a record of each and every last one..

Cephus said:

But how do you do that? And what if the representatives of one candidate is involved? And especially with code, do you let the candidates crawl through the code themselves?

Click to expand...

No one has to be involved... Open source code.. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

Every great computer scientists has been free to go through the code for years, everyone interested has..

Cephus said:

But how do you do that? And what if the representatives of one candidate is involved? And especially with code, do you let the candidates crawl through the code themselves? What if one side is sneakier than the other? There is no system that is safer than the people involved are.



Anything is inherently falsifiable. And as an individual voter, no system is inherently better than any other, which is what the OP is saying. I don't buy it. As an individual voter, even if you can check out what you voted, that doesn't prove a thing. Say you have a million voters in your state, just to keep the numbers easy. Even if all one million voters can and do check out their individual votes, that proves nothing about what comes out the other end because no one has access to the whole of the voting record, as well as the individual voters, but the people running the election. And if they are dishonest, they can manipulate the numbers any way that they please. You have to trust that they are being honest. And even if you have people watching the people running the election, you have to trust that the people watching aren't dishonest. Any election is only as honest as those who have the means to manipulate it.

Click to expand...

So, great thing about blockchain... Everyone in the world has full access to the full voting record and the open source code.. You could check and see every vote..

I've played around a bit with bitcoins, and I see two major problems to using blockchain technology for voting. First is the issue of anonymity. There are very good reasons we have secret ballots in the US. Blockchain technology removes that secrecy, because the whole point of it is that everything happens in the open. The second issue is with security. Not the security of the process, but the security of the coins. Everyone gets a coin to vote with, and that coin is stored in your wallet on your computer until you move it. That coin is only as secure as your computer is, which for the vast majority of people is "not very". Votecoins would absolutely get lost and stolen. Maybe in small numbers, maybe in large numbers, but it would happen. It did and still does frequently with bitcoins.

Want to try it, Good idea.. ,

I think we should always try to use the best technology. If this means it is new and different from how we did it before than many people will not like it. But if it is better than before and the people do not like it we should still use it. The people will get used to it in time and it is impossible to make everybody happy.


Joey