Blockchain could bring electronic voting to Australia by 2017

It's clear from initiatives like this that the people coming up with these ideas either don't understand why our current voting system exists, or don't understand the technical challenges digitising them.

The only way that an online voting system could work safely is if every vote was anonymous, as well as being stored in an immutable ledger.

However, you'd also need to make sure that nobody could vote twice, so you'd have to mail to everyone in the country (similar to the census) a UUID that would serve as their token. And due to the fact that votes need to be secret and that the postal system could be manipulated, you would have to provide a service for people to get their UUID in person. Once you have that UUID, it must be stored such that there is no link to the person who's UUID it is.

Then and only then could you actually get close to having a safe voting system (with public oversight). However, there are still the usual problems of how do you get a copy of the software securely, is the software going to be free software, how will the software be audited, who will host it and mirror it, etc.

The great thing about Australia's voting system (and any paper voting system in fact) is that it is decentralised. If a single voting center screwed up your votes, none of the others are affected. If an online voting system has a bug, then potentially every vote is in danger.

Given the ongoing mess that was the onlineification of the 2016 census, I don't think anyone (the people or the government) would have any interest in this.

The Australian election system is pretty damn good, and very trustworthy, because it works with pencils, papers, and lots of eyes on the ballots and the counters.