New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting - CryptoCoinsNews

The news that somewhere in South Korea some sort of local government had some sort of election and recorded the votes on some sort of blockchain restarted some discussions about whether electronic voting might be just around the corner. As I have often suggested, the idea of using smartphones instead of ballot papers seems rather obvious.

With a sample ballot on their smartphone a voter will only need to bring their phone with them when the polls open;

[From New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting - CryptoCoinsNews]

Great. But hold on...

it’s projected that through an app built on the blockchain voters won’t have to make the trip to polls in the future.

[From New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting - CryptoCoinsNews]

Oh dear. This sort of system might be acceptable for shareholder voting and that sort of thing, but it certainly isn’t acceptable for either local or national government elections for a variety of reasons all of which have been reiterated endlessly on this very blog (principal among them the issue of voter intimidation). I am firmly of the opinion that voting should be a public act.

That doesn’t mean, however, that new technology cannot make a very big difference to the electoral process. Just to illustrate on sensible use of blockchain technology in this context, imagine a voting system whereby the elector authenticates access to a private key and is returned a cryptographically-blinded permission to vote. They go down to the polling both a tap their phone or bluetooth or QR or whatever to communicate their vote. Then they choose their candidate. Let’s say they vote for President Camacho. When they get home they can log in to traverse the election block chain and they can see if their vote has indeed ended up in the right bucket. In fact, they can see every vote in every vote (although they don’t know who those votes came from).