Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler doesn't seem all that great.
The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future", yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.
This is the part of the conversation when a Canadian points out that federal elections are conducted on straightforward paper ballots where you mark an X next to the person’s name. They are hand-counted with reps from all of the parties and election officials present, and it can take hours before the results are ready. No machines and no reason to screw up a process that every one understands.
There are a lot of things in our lives that would benefit from greater efficiency, this isn’t one of them.
As for the blockchain, do computer books for kids not start with a lesson on GIGO anymore? You still need to trust the information that gets written to the chain is valid.
Voter lists (allowing for on-site registration with ID or proof of address), tear-away serial numbers, and checks throughout the process, including the election official initialing the back of the ballot they hand you and confirming their initials are authentic when you come back with it filled out. In reality you usually don’t go more than a dozen feet from them to mark it anyway. There’s a good rundown here:
It helps that it is very rare to have a referendum question so you are usually just voting for your local member of parliament. The ballots are very clear:
It doesn’t take that long to count by hand, and it’s rare that people don’t accept a result or engage in conspiracy theories and court battles for months after an election. Recounts happen if the results are very close but there is usually very little movement in totals.
It is apparently a bit more expensive than using machines but I think it’s worth it. There’s something meaningful and beneficial for a civic culture when everyone votes with a tangible physical act in largely the same way it has been done for 150 years. It’s an unusual but radically inclusive act.
Voting by mail is possible by request, but less common, and uses a double envelope system to achieve a similar outcome.
Canada's elections are quite amenable to manual tabulation. Color me envious.
Years ago, a group of us activists in the USA tried to understand manual counting better. We timed ourselves on mock elections using the "sort and stack" system. It goes about as fast as you'd expect (and reminded me of being a junior bookkeeper reconciling accounts at the end of period, ahhh nostalgia).
We also self-funded some official manual recounts, just to get better metrics. It wasn't pretty.
USA's elections are generally over complicated, with many races/issues per ballot. To enable efficient manual counting, we'd have to redesign our ballots so that they could be physically separately into federal, state, local sub-ballots, for separate processing.
Replacing FPTP with Approval Voting and Proportional Representation would also help.
> To enable efficient manual counting, we'd have to redesign our ballots so that they could be physically separately into federal, state, local sub-ballots, for separate processing.
What if it just took 3 days to count the votes? People looking over each ballot and calling out the results, seconding them, and having someone keep a tally on a big chalkboard. They could even close the markets during the counting process to prevent the rampant speculation from causing wide swings. Does it need to be that efficient? If America can wait 2 months to swear in the new president, surely it can wait 3 days for the results to be counted. It's not like the world stopped spinning in 2000 when it took several weeks to finish the Florida count.
Florida is a pretty bad example because the Supreme Court ruling was that (1) Bush had to be declared the winner because if the original declared winner was overturned people would lose their faith in the voting system, and (2) resolving the case was taking too long so Florida had to stop trying.
There are a lot of examples of incompetence. eg the butterfly ballots where the candidates and the circles don't line up.
With the "hanging chads", the administrators hadn't cleaned the machines for years (after each election, turn over the machines and shake out the chads), so the holes filled up with chads, preventing new votes. Otherwise, the punch ballots weren't the worst option.
Sorry to geek out about this stuff. It was my thing for a while.
Plenty of idiots use an ATM and work with the financial system and all of its quirks without much issue, why would a blockchain-based system be any different?
It's not about using the system as an "user". It's about the fact that it bases democracy on principles which are way beyond the mathematical capabilities of 99%+ of the electorate!
I mean, if my government decides to use some crypto/blockhain magic, there is no way I can figure out if using hash algorithm H in a method X is valid choice or if it is a backdoor/negligence.
This is an issue which simply does not happen with paper ballots (backdooring these is of course possible, but really expensive especially at scale). The attack surface is easy to reason out, unlike with cryptography.
Maybe it does not matter though (and maybe I am afraid of mathematicians secretly taking over the world, ha!)
Accounting uses double entry (credits & debits), election administration does not. Compulsory voting could make election administration look more like accounting.
Blockchains explicitly remove privacy, whereas voting should be the Australian Ballot, aka private voting & public counting.
> Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand
"Black box" abstraction is utilized everywhere in the world and has been a core part of many functional systems. That's a silly basis to dismiss any technology.
"Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler doesn't seem all that great."
I for one am quite happy that a migration from horse carriages, understandable by a middle schooler, to cars and trains has happened.
I don't have a position on using the blockchain for elections, I'm just not convinced by your point.
This probably means you're confused about what voting is for. Voting does not produce better results. What it does is give the voters confidence in the decision process. This confidence is damaged by difficult to understand technology. The boring paper ballot with an X on it is understandable to almost every citizen and so the legitimacy of results from that process is clearer.
Democracy is a good idea not because it results in good government, you have only to look around and see the hopeless incompetents elected around the world, but because it averts violent regime change. Why march on the capital with pitchforks when we can just vote for somebody else?
The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future", yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.