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How Bitcoin Could Be Key To Online Voting
blottsie (3618811) writes If implemented correctly, the proliferation of online voting could solve one of the biggest problems in American democracy: low voter turnout. The 2014 midterms, for example, boasted the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries. Making online voting work is infinitely harder than it initially seems. However, in the past few years, there's been a renewed effort to solve the conundrum of online voting using a most unexpected tool: Bitcoin. The key idea is this: The main job in online voting is ensuring that the election system records someone’s vote the way they intended. Running votes over the blockchain, which is public, creates an auditable trail linking a person and their vote. Bitcoin-enabled voters don’t have to place their trust in Florida ballot counters trying to discern the difference a hanging chad and a dimpled chad—nor in black box online voting systems from private companies where what’s happening inside is a mystery. The proof is right there on the blockchain.
You can't have an auditable trail and a secret ballot.
Isn't one of the key features of modern voting the ability not to have your vote connected to you? This is part of the reason why there's so much argument over "card check" voting systems for unionization, because it allows the union or the company to coerce workers into voting one way or the other, since their vote is not anonymous.
I'm sorry, but what idiot has decided that having your vote be a matter of public record is a good idea?
From all of the news stories I've heard over the last year or so, I don't trust Bitcoin at all.
So WTF would I want this tied to voting for?
This sounds like an incredibly stupid idea. Bitcoin seems like it's barely usable as a currency, it has no place trying to prop up democracy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And now you don't have an audible trail: I can't be sure my ballot was counted correctly. The first comment above still holds.
What brought those sites down was not a flaw in the technology of the blockchain.
It was either incompetence or plain old fraud which can always occur in any context.
People who lost bitcoins had already given up control of their coin to those organizations and the trading within their platforms is off-the-chain except for the parts where people deposit coin and withdraw.
Nobody ever lost bitcoin that they kept in their own wallets unless they were stupid enough not to get necessary precautions, like getting their pc hacked while not having their wallet encrypted with a secret passphrase.
Bitcoin cannot protect you against stupidity. Nothing can infact