[athenot]

The article indirectly addresses that in the last paragraph: paper is something everyone understands.

I'm all for improving processes with technology but I'll have to admit that even though I've been neck deep in Software development for 2 decades, the block-chain solutions require a fair amount of mental work for me. They may be good but I don't readily understand them. And I can guarantee you that my parents don't.

This brings up the problem of having a solution that only a few experts know how it works. It's a hard sell on the rest of the population to have them trust these "certified voting technology experts" that would have to be in place.

[AdrienChey]

Indeed, that's seems like a big weak point: you need to understanding the technology to trust it!

First, I think that's a great news, if the limitation is only human and not logical, because humain can changes (a bit).

Let's look at the digital world currently: Peoples, companies and state, use internet to store and transfer private and valuable informations. All the world financial assets are process on the network, almost everyone use ATM, and store personal picture online etc. All of this with just a very few percent of the population (people like me and you) knowing "more or less" how this really works!

A main adoption of online voting on the block chain will required efforts for everybody with the knowledge to democratize it, but in fact you don't need to understand all of it to trust it (like when you withdrawing money from an ATM).

We could say right now that everyone owning bitcoin "trust" the block-chain, and I would be surprise if more than 50% of them have read and understand Satoshi's whitepaper and the fundamental basics of the network.

Also at the end, even if it's intellectually new, it's not that difficult to understand even for our beloved parents :)

[seangrogg]

While that's a decent premise and I agree that less than 5% of the US population understands blockchains, I would also reckon they don't understand HTTP (or HTTPS) protocols, B-trees, networks, cryptographic hashes, or even the compilers that underpin much of technology. But they're more than willing to trust these things with the entirety of their liquid assets if it spares them a 20 minute trip to the bank.

I think there would still be a group of people who don't trust blockchains (or, let's be real, technology whatsoever - like the interviewee). And they're the people that drive to booths and do their business on paper. And I'm okay with that.

[pm24601]

However, with all of those. If there is a problem: either the consequences are not significant. Or there is a paperwork around to a problem, which includes laws and judges.

With online voting, we are deciding the judges that get to say - "everything is totally perfect with the way I got elected."

[seangrogg]

Honestly, given the fact that a significant number of people already think their vote "doesn't count" (given on average ~40% of people don't even bother) I doubt they would be more concerned with vote tampering than with potential identity/bank theft.

[ethbro]

Electronic voting machines are used in many places in the US. I can guarantee you most people couldn't give you any details on how they work. Yet they still accepted them relatively quickly.