[not_a_cop75]

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it sounds like your main argument is that current blockchain does presently do these things with the goal of voting in mind, not that it can't do these things.

One benefit of blockchain is allowing extreme accountability, which seems to be a greater and greater requirement of democracy with large populations.

[lalaland1125]

You get less accountability with a blockchain (or any digital voting) system as those systems are much harder to audit and have many more flaws than paper voting.

[HNisCurated]

Citation needed. A public blockchain is a mere write only database that everyone can see.

Every transaction is available to 7 billion people.

Vs paper voting which is only as legitimate as every voting station.

[r3bl]

> A public blockchain is a mere write only database

Precisely. It does nothing to address who can write to it. Ideally, it should be people who are eligible to vote (citizens of the country that are over 18 years old). That's a difficult problem to solve even with paper ballots (especially in a country that doesn't have national IDs), and pretty much impossible to solve with any sort of a digital solution.

> ...that everyone can see.

...or nobody can, as you'd see by reading the article that was submitted.

> Every transaction is available to 7 billion people.

7 billion people can see how to vote as well. You're not asking 7 billion people to vote, but a small subset of 7 billion people.

[sam1r]

A public blockchain is a mere write only database that everyone can see.

^ Love how simply put this is

[not_a_cop75]

Do you have a citation for this statement of fact? Proper research?

[lalaland1125]

I'm not exactly sure what type of evidence you are looking for with respect to the assertion that auditing a paper ballot system is easier than auditing a electronic voting system. Auditing a paper ballot system is trivial: any person who can see and can count can do it. On the other hand, if you are relying on a software system you need to audit the hardware, the software, etc, etc which requires a lot of skill and is tricky.

[not_a_cop75]

Paper ballots can be dumped in the trash. What's your mitigation for that?

[pjc50]

Citation in the actual article:

"But how secure and accurate was the 2018 vote? It’s impossible to tell because the state and the company aren’t sharing the basic information experts say is necessary to properly evaluate whether the blockchain voting pilot was actually a resounding success"

[not_a_cop75]

Not impossible to tell. If you do a 100% poll of a given county and ask for statistics afterwards, you have an impromptu security analysis.

How would you conduct a similar audit of how secure a paper ballot is for any given system? If all you do is an audit of a single vote, then you're no different.

Until paper ballots can no longer be dumped in the trash, paper auditing is hard at best.