| Correct, there are several aspects to voting that blockchains don't address: - The Human Identification Problem (not sure if there is a more official name): uniquely identifying a human being. If you solve this, you solve many forms of fraud (anything rooted in identity fraud) and eliminate entire industries dedicated to reducing fraud losses. Best attempt so far has been the Estonian ID system [0]; Sam Altman tried with Worldcoin but that ended up being yet another crypto grift. Incidentally, Estonia uses its identity system for electronic voting. - Proof of citizenship; citizenship in the US for most people is a birth certificate issued by a hospital or other authority several decades ago, or a proxy to this document such as a passport. Naturalized citizens have it easier here because they have a state-issued document declaring their citizenship. - Proof of residence: This is also something not verifiable via a blockchain or smart contract, because it depends on the state and relies in part on your physical location and your intent. Legally you can only vote from one voting address, but there are countless people registered with multiple addresses across states as they move residences. - Secret ballots: You cannot tie votes back to voters in a free election. Blockchains are open and publicly-verifiable, which is good; but cast ballots cannot be verified _even by the voter_. Blockchain doesn't bring anything to the table here over, say, a database; because the recorded ballots must not be tied back to human identities, you cannot use any of the work done to verify the three previous points to verify the election outcome. Blockchain would boil down to replacing or augmenting paper ballots with a provably immutable record, where you still need to place trust in the system recording votes on the chain. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card |
I believe you can do this with crypto. It's still anonymous. The government verify you, then give you a signed key that you use to generate your voter ID locally yourself. The network accepts your voter ID because it's signed. I think there's even ways to allow single use signatures and so on.
Now everyone gets one and only one voter ID (which is like their wallet) but for voting.
You can decide how many years that's valid for.