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1. Identification is not needed, only presenting a token, everyone gets exactly one token during the occasional registration. If you lose a token, you can get another one, deactivating the last ones. 2. There should not be any proof of work. Really, PoW is one of the worst things to secure a blockchain. In fact, you don’t need a blockchain. You just need a Merkle Tree. Blockchains are about ordering of transactions - the order here is irrelevant! (see caveat below) 3. How can you be sure every vote is counted in ANY system? As long as you can communicate your vote to a network, the gossip protocol takes care of it. Everyone gossips every vote to their neighbors, so just send it to a few nodes. Again - NO BLOCKCHAIN. 4. For each election, you fork a token to use. Then you simply participate in token mixers, like Monero rings. Put all your derived tokens into a hat, then each takes a token and uses it to cast a vote. You may be wondering, what if someone votes with an “old” token version that hasn’t been mixed. First of all, we can require mixing. And secondly, they cryptographically signed over their token to someone else so when that someone votes with that token, it will override your vote for that token. Since they present your signature in the token history, that you signed it over. This also allows us to have forms of democracy where you sign over tokens to other people for a timestamp range of, say, the next 1-2 years, to make decisions on your behalf. Better than representative democracy. More like a giant parliamentary system. You may pick a science expert to vote for scientific bills, and a criminal justice reform activist to vote for criminal justice bills. We can get to near total participation in the democracy this way. Caveat: although honest validators in each district can construct an eventually consistent Merkle tree by simply finding all validly signed tokens, ordering them lexicographically, and signing them, we DO need a “cutoff” time that they stop accepting offers. This is a Buridan’s ass problem, and it gets even hairier in a Byzantine Generals setting. We need to know that no one submitted a vote after the cutoff time. Thus, we need a two phase commit — each node has to gossip the cutoff time and other nodes have to acknowledge a widely gossipped message or get kicked out of the consensus. There are always edge cases to this — see Ripple’s consensus process for instance — and theoretically in very unlikely cases a “fork” can propagate to the population at large, one person thinking a vote was cast before the cutoff and the other thinking the vote was cast after the cutoff. But unless that handful of votes determines the entire election, that won’t matter. And frankly the same thing can happen even more with current systems. |