It’s Time for Online Voting (NYTimes Opinion)

nytimes.com

1 point·tuckermi··3 comments

I got as far as the subtitle, "Using blockchain technology", and then I realized the author is from the "Blockchain Research Institute" and then closed the tab.

In an era where electronic voting is increasingly shown to be flawed, we are not nearly prepared to be able to vote online. And the blockchain is not going to fix it.

I'm not familiar with "Blockchain Research Institute", so I'm not sure if your comment is critical of them as an organization or not. I am also wary of the blockchain-is-magic hype train, so I generally agree with your assessment that we aren't prepared to vote online.

While I wasn't surprised by the overall lack of technical details given the medium/audience, I did find it odd that the question of privacy was essentially ignored. Do they have a solution in mind that allows me to validate that my vote is in the ledger without the vote being traceable back to me?

I have no specific knowledge of the Blockchain Research Institute, but a guy from a blockchain-based organization is claiming we all need to use the blockchain. If you have a hammer, everything else looks like a nail.

And if we're going to use anything for something as important as voting, it better have demonstrated its real, long-term value in something far less crucial.

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