The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future", yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.
There are a lot of things in our lives that would benefit from greater efficiency, this isn’t one of them.
As for the blockchain, do computer books for kids not start with a lesson on GIGO anymore? You still need to trust the information that gets written to the chain is valid.
http://www.wheresthepaper.org/CountPaperBallots.htm
It helps that it is very rare to have a referendum question so you are usually just voting for your local member of parliament. The ballots are very clear:
http://www.opinionatedbastard.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/...
It doesn’t take that long to count by hand, and it’s rare that people don’t accept a result or engage in conspiracy theories and court battles for months after an election. Recounts happen if the results are very close but there is usually very little movement in totals.
It is apparently a bit more expensive than using machines but I think it’s worth it. There’s something meaningful and beneficial for a civic culture when everyone votes with a tangible physical act in largely the same way it has been done for 150 years. It’s an unusual but radically inclusive act.
Voting by mail is possible by request, but less common, and uses a double envelope system to achieve a similar outcome.
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=vote&do...
Years ago, a group of us activists in the USA tried to understand manual counting better. We timed ourselves on mock elections using the "sort and stack" system. It goes about as fast as you'd expect (and reminded me of being a junior bookkeeper reconciling accounts at the end of period, ahhh nostalgia).
We also self-funded some official manual recounts, just to get better metrics. It wasn't pretty.
USA's elections are generally over complicated, with many races/issues per ballot. To enable efficient manual counting, we'd have to redesign our ballots so that they could be physically separately into federal, state, local sub-ballots, for separate processing.
Replacing FPTP with Approval Voting and Proportional Representation would also help.
With the "hanging chads", the administrators hadn't cleaned the machines for years (after each election, turn over the machines and shake out the chads), so the holes filled up with chads, preventing new votes. Otherwise, the punch ballots weren't the worst option.
Sorry to geek out about this stuff. It was my thing for a while.
This is how Australia does it. It works fine.
I mean, if my government decides to use some crypto/blockhain magic, there is no way I can figure out if using hash algorithm H in a method X is valid choice or if it is a backdoor/negligence.
This is an issue which simply does not happen with paper ballots (backdooring these is of course possible, but really expensive especially at scale). The attack surface is easy to reason out, unlike with cryptography.
Maybe it does not matter though (and maybe I am afraid of mathematicians secretly taking over the world, ha!)
Blockchains explicitly remove privacy, whereas voting should be the Australian Ballot, aka private voting & public counting.
"Black box" abstraction is utilized everywhere in the world and has been a core part of many functional systems. That's a silly basis to dismiss any technology.
I for one am quite happy that a migration from horse carriages, understandable by a middle schooler, to cars and trains has happened.
I don't have a position on using the blockchain for elections, I'm just not convinced by your point.
Democracy is a good idea not because it results in good government, you have only to look around and see the hopeless incompetents elected around the world, but because it averts violent regime change. Why march on the capital with pitchforks when we can just vote for somebody else?