HyveMind: Election Infrastructure on the Blockchain [pdf]
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Multiple checks on the trail with the ability to vote anonymously, in person prevents both fraudulent entries and coerced entries. Blockchain only covers 1 of the 2. And makes the coercion part more realizable.
Anonymous supervised paper trail is how many many states do elections. Scantron style ballots are simple and reliable.
Today is yet again not that day.
Irrelevant. The USA holds elections in November and seats the winners in January. What do you need instant results for? It's fine to take hours or even 48 hours after polls close in order to get it right.
The news media loves breathless real-time results because it allows them to lazily report on elections like they're sporting races, but I do not think that this is healthy for democracy. Reporting on poll numbers are in some places banned until the polls close, for good reason that it can influence the results.
> The totals cannot be changed or otherwise tampered with.
Wishful thinking. Fraud can still happen at the edges, when the data is entered. An electronic button press will always be less effort to fake in the regard that a mark on paper.
> There are no conflicts of interest in administering the election like what happen in Georgia
Non-sequitur. Elections should be independently administered regardless of medium, and person in this position would have opportunities to fix the results regardless of medium.
>Elections should be independently administered
The key word is "should." Your statement here shows that you either didn't read the paper at all or did and failed to grasp the most basic premise of the entire proposal; using the system elections are not administered by any party. Questions are posed and the system administers the vote collection and tabulating without human assistance or intervention.
>Wishful thinking
Not at all. The tamper resistance is mathematically proven. Unless an adversary controlled 51% of the network hashing power, it's impossible to change history. Of course the voter's client could be compromised but there are measures to get around such issues.
>Irrelevant.
I was responding to your original question of what does this do that paper can't. Now it seems you've moved the goal posts in order to argue with a strawman.
Look, I'm not a "crypto can solve everything" kinda guy, but it seems to me that if there's one area where blockchain tech shines it's in reliably collecting and retaining distributed information in an adversarial environment. That's exactly what voting is so I actually see this proposal as one of the few uses of crypto that's only argument for existence isnt "because distributed."
Make up your mind.
> Not at all. The tamper resistance is mathematically proven.
Missing the point that this is irrelevant if the wrong data is entered.
> Now it seems you've moved the goal posts in order to argue with a strawman.
No, I'm arguing about what's best for elections. That IMHO is the most important point.