[JadeNB]

> 3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology does, regardless of cost?

Not defending blockchain, but this seems like an absurdly high standard. To me, the cost of a technology is definitely one factor in evaluating what is better or worse for solving a given problem.

[acdha]

It might be a bit strong — I would phrase it as “What does a blockchain do better than the alternatives?” — but I think it's justified in this cause because of how inefficient blockchains are for most problems. It's not just the cost of all of the extra hardware but also the design impacts of what operations you consider fast and the reliability impact of a shared global view.

In particular, in this case the question I'd be asking is “how is this better than PKI?” because that can do the job with multiple orders of magnitude less overhead and would be suitable for use in scenarios with limited bandwidth or which are completely offline, which is realistic for voting.

[wccrawford]

I somewhat agree, but with the amount of money that has already been spent on failed electronic voting systems, I think "regardless of cost" is pretty accurate here.