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Colorado Candidate For Governor Wants To Put His State On the Blockchain (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Democratic nominee for governor of Colorado, U.S. Representative Jared Polis, wants to add blockchain to the list of items voters consider this year. Polis currently represents Colorado's 2nd district in the House, and he won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination last month. He's held his seat in the House for about a decade and has been a fairly solid progressive. On Wednesday, Polis added a set of limited proposals regarding blockchain to his gubernatorial platform that at least give us an idea of what it means for a politician to campaign on blockchain. Polis told us he would like to resolve some of the "ambiguity" in federal rules, encourage fintech company investment, remove some licensing requirements for token securities, and exempt cryptocurrencies from state money transition laws. He says these companies are "trying to fit what they're doing into an obsolete, outdated, and often obsolete federal law."
Polis also wants to explore how blockchain could be used for voting security. Polis isn't ready to necessarily endorse moving all voting to the blockchain system. He likes paper ballots and told us, "this would be more how the information is generated and stored from those paper ballots rather than doing so in a centralized database it would be done across a distributed ledger." The congressman also thinks that blockchain could be used to streamline the process for storing public records and making them available to the public. "We're talking more about everything from Colorado contracts, expenditures, titles, a lot of the data-intensive aspects of state government can be more secure and more accessible through distributed ledgers," he said.
Polis also wants to explore how blockchain could be used for voting security. Polis isn't ready to necessarily endorse moving all voting to the blockchain system. He likes paper ballots and told us, "this would be more how the information is generated and stored from those paper ballots rather than doing so in a centralized database it would be done across a distributed ledger." The congressman also thinks that blockchain could be used to streamline the process for storing public records and making them available to the public. "We're talking more about everything from Colorado contracts, expenditures, titles, a lot of the data-intensive aspects of state government can be more secure and more accessible through distributed ledgers," he said.
By fraud, I mean inside jobs that paper ballots don't protect against. We aren't looking for the cheapest solution, but the most secure one. The number of times paper ballots have gone missing, or been accidentally destroyed, even when subpoenaed, is astounding. Keep the hand marked paper ballots, count and use them as the primary method, mark each with a digital signature that is the identifying owner and the key in the blockchain that the voter does not see. Have all the voting precincts across the state, or nation, distribute the ledger using the digital credentials to verify the chain. This will put an end to "losing the ballots" and wiping a single server or losing a few USB keys being viable voter suppression methods while still using the paper as the primary method and blockchain to reduce fraud. The sheer number of times this has happened sickens me and something needs to be done besides some paultry fines people gladly pay to change the outcome.