35 karma · joined October 8, 2015
In the current implementation of PublicVotes, it costs around $1 to record some 200 votes into the Blockchain. This is quite expensive compared to systems such as Civitas, but it is arguably, cheaper than the current system where governments often count vote ballots by hand. (at least that's how it's done around here in Italy).
Nonetheless, I do think though that Smart Contracts can play an important role in future voting systems, and obviously they can empower entire governments. I will work on a Liquid Democracy model next for which Smart Contracts make a lot of sense.
But overall, there are some interesting concepts to protect such systems against sybil-attacks, so that we can ensure that 1 person == 1 vote any nothing more.
Right now this is a Proof of Concept though, more voting applications will follow.
But to basically explain what happened, each poll has a minimum 0.2 Ether which are used for paying the network for executing the smart contract. Since more than 100 people have voted on the system, it means that the account (which holds the Ether) went out of tokens and now nobody can vote anymore.
I'm right now working on fixing this by creating a balancing system that basically creates a faucet. But feel free to create a new poll. You can send me the link here and I'll send some Ether to get you going.