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Comment by deciplex | Hacker News Reader

Without commenting on the particular circumstances here, it seems to me that the nominating process for a political party ought to be at least a little bit undemocratic. At the very least, current office-holders in the party ought to have some say in who gets nominated. (I would agree that giving corporate donors a say is pretty bad.)

If instead the DNC ran open primaries in each state with no superdelegates, what would be the point? You might as well just ban parties altogether (for election purposes anyway, caucusing might be a separate thing) and just have regular elections with two rounds. Note that I would prefer this, but I don't think it's what Greenwald is getting at.

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My main point was not a claim on how a particular party should allocate their votes, or whether the primaries should be open to certain (or all) voters - rather the point of the paper is that the process can be completely transparent and cryptographically verifiable, so that once the votes are cast, any person can count the votes themselves and make sure the votes fell according to the rules which the party decided on (however fair or unfair those rules may be).

This doesn't do much for caucuses, for example, and it sounds pretty expensive compared to the current system in some states. It's not just about party control of candidates or "gaming" whatever system is in place.

Many states require the local parties to pay for their own primaries. Many local parties are bare bones organisations that only ramp up activity every couple of years or so. Voting mechanisms need to be scalable, affordable across a diversity of budgets and technical skill sets. Caucuses, for example, exist because they are dead easy to explain, don't cost any money, and are transparent at least so far as everyone can see who won just by looking around the room.

I don't actually expect it to be that expensive - myself and the authors of the paper have a working demo of the paper which I wrote myself in a couple of weeks (react-native clients / bigchaindb) and should be scalable to population levels (I'm still working on speeding up the crypto since I used some of my old demo code). A side note: this was my first project using react-native, and I found it to be quite fun.

As far as transparency, that's sort of the main point of the paper: if everyone can themselves check the votes by doing something as simple as looking at something like bc.info, then that imo is a large increase in transparency from the current system which only allows the room-members themselves to verify the results. I agree with you that caucuses in their current form are easy to explain, however I think we can abstract away all the difficult parts and make it a pleasant / easy experience.

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