[dozzie]

Please learn first how cryptographers attempt to solve problems in voting, and, more importantly, what these problems actually are. Blockchain is just a timestamping protocol. Voting has nothing to do with timestamps and everything with (1) not knowing how your neighbour voted and (2) validating that your vote was properly counted.

[davidgerard]

This precisely fails to answer the question. Voting is commonly put forward as a use case for blockchains and indeed Bitcoin, so a simple "how on earth does that even scale" is hardly an unreasonable question. A helpful answer would be something more than "lol read up n00b" and probably more like pointing at a real-life working example.

[dozzie]

> This precisely fails to answer the question. Voting is commonly put forward as a use case for blockchains [...]

Commonly and incorrectly. It's like asking how to weld steel using milk and pasta -- the very question is ill-formed. Voting has very different problems than what distributed timestamping (a.k.a. blockchain) solves.

> A helpful answer would be something more than "lol read up n00b"

And I didn't specify the field the OP should read about? And on what problems? I think I did. It really takes one trivial query in Google to get a grasp, and I provided the necessary keywords.

[ccarter84]

Secrecy of the vote is necessary to prevent against such things as vote buying and manipulating others to vote a certain way through intimidation (these days more of a problem outside of US).

The validating that a vote was counted appropriately probably could be used in a block chain type mechanism, but may need to be more with a zcash type of implementation.

I'm a true believer that more tech is not the right answer for voting security. (At least for the near term). Voter-verified paper ballots, that can be run through open-source tabulators and then stored for a subsequent mandatory audit would be ideal (3-5% is the target I think we've gone for in Cali).

[yaacov]

Can you recommend specific resources?

[CrazyPyroLinux]

Not specific to cryptography, but a good understanding of voting in general is another important foundation. For that, I found this class very interesting: https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy