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Comment by RL_Quine | Hacker News Reader

Your solution doesn't provide a solution to the core problem.

How do you identify that voters have a vote, and people that shouldn't have a vote didn't vote.

> How do you identify that voters have a vote

The voters can see that their own transaction went through. Administrators (and everyone else) can count total votes cast at the end of the elections by the balances of the candidates' wallets. That's at least as good as paper ballots in this specific respect.

> and people that shouldn't have a vote didn't vote.

The voter's wallet can be tied to the voter's registration. Again, at least as good as what we have now, in this specific respect.

I think I've just made a more elaborated restatement of what I already said. Could you identify a specific hole in my system? You could point to voting software _in general_ being a bad idea, and that's fair enough. But it doesn't sound like that's what you were saying.

> The voters can see that their own transaction went through.

How do you prevent vote selling and coercion?

Yeah I can't solve that part :-P Is this what people mean by "the identification problem"? I must have misunderstood.

I don't believe they'll be able to prove they voted for a candidate without giving away their keys.

They could sell or rent the keys though.

This is why your key should also be used to replace your social security number.

So … anyone who's ever had access to it (spouse, employer, school, etc.) can view your voting history forever and there's nothing you can do about it?

If your boss, union leader, controlling spouse, etc. tells you to vote a certain way, they would gain the ability to demand that you give them your identifier if it's public or, if not, login and show them the final vote status. This is very hard to detect and anyone proposing a blockchain needs to learn why election systems are designed the way they are first since this is not a hypothetical problem.

We have plenty of jurisdictions with vote-by-mail who've been doing it for a long time. Long enough that we should have some idea how common this occurrence is. It seems like the answer is that one vote isn't worth nearly enough to risk the penalties involved.

Concerns about vote selling and coercion are already gone. It's practically impossible to actually prevent people from filming their votes as they are cast, and livestreaming my vote to you is just as good as having you sit in my doorway for it.

I don't know where you live but all of the polling places around me are very clear about not allowing photography. Similarly, someone who has pressure to vote a different way has the option of taking that picture to show to their boss and then getting a new ballot after voiding the old one.

The beauty of paper ballots is you can spoil them and get a new blank sheet. Sure, livestream yourself filling out your ballot. That doesn't mean you actually cast that ballot. The poll workers will tell you to put your camera away when you're outside the booth on the way to the ballot box.

At least it'd be no worse than we have now with voting my mail.

Use the registration system we have now, where you give each voter a token (literally, even if you want - a qr code on a paper card) to vote?

I don't know why arguing that blockchain doesn't magically solve all your problems means that it can't be used to solve any of them.

We can even still have voting at registered polling places with judges.

But, instead of throwing our votes into a magic black box, how about we put them on a blockchain and receive a way to audit our own votes?

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