Elon Musk calls for an end to electronic voting.
(twitter.com)
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Yes but ...
How would you ever know if your vote had been accurately passed by the machine into the blockchain system? You would need to ask a machine to display the blockchain records for you and that could be lying as well.
Like any other blockchain, you query the database.
It would be public, but with zero-knowledge-proof based so the voter can confirm their vote was accurate, and that it was processed. Can't lie in math.
Do you even know how a blockchain works? It's a public reciept list processed by a decentralized group of validators.
Anyone could see that their vote was tallied near instantly. There could never be any vote fakery if it was linked with standard identity documents (which would be like NFTs that couldn't be sold)
We have the technology, whole blockchains are already governed via voting already. It's used for validating parts back to their original factory, and ties in where the materials came from. It's just an advanced reciept system.
We've seen the fuckery happen with paper ballots. You have to trust people and trust hiring, and trust management. With blockchain type tech, it's trust-less, there is nothing to trust since it's mathematically self regulating
You are on to something, we need to push this blockchain technology further as it could be the potential solution to election fraud we've been waiting for
We need this installed ASAP to ensure no election is ever stolen in America ever again
But that can be made not to work. So it is not reliable. Sample program in no particular language:
Voting Enter Trump or Biden: If response="Trump" then Add 1 to TrumpVote Set cheat flag to True Else Add 1 to BidenVote Set cheat flag to False End
Counting If cheat=True then Add 1 to BidenVote Else Add 1 to BidenVote
Basically, a flag is set somewhere in the record that triggers the counting program to interpret the votes differently. Any checks on the database will look OK and only a detailed examination of every bit in the record will show up something unrecognised but most of the record will be hard to decode anyway.
The program is a bit simplistic because other candidates would also be present and the "cheat" might not be applied depending on some criteria - like Trump exceeding 95% of the Biden vote, for instance.
It is like the voting record that logged a vote for either all Republicans or all Democrats and Trump was listed as a RepubIican so did not match. Clue: the lower case "L" was actually an upper case "I" thus ensuring that those who voted Republican down the ballot would not automatically include a vote for Trump. Stuff can be hidden in all kinds of ways.
You still just don't get it. You can download the entire blockchain yourself, query it yourself. There's no middleman.
You would be able to see via your ID, what your vote was. The system is transparent, verifiable, all while retaining privacy for the users.
Which is why these types of systems should be open source, and run in a decentralized manner. Unlike the dominion digital voting, which is not.
This is like saying you can never rob a bank because the door of the safe is two feet thick and the lock is unpickable. But people can still rob banks!
Let's assume that blockchain is perfect and there is no way to add or misrepresent the data in there. That is a tall order, but let's move on. How do you count those records? Let's go down the Stalin route: "It is not the people who vote that count but the people who count the votes."
New sample program:
For Each Blockchain_Record
If Candidate Biden or Trump then Add 1 to Temp
Else Add 1 to Candidate_Name
End
Biden = 0.52 * Temp
Trump = Temp - Biden
Print Results
Biden wins by four percentage points and the blockchain was perfect regardless of votes.
The details of that program could be hidden anywhere. It could even delete itself after use. What do all those 350+ Services all do on your Windows PC? What do all the dlls do? How many hidden segments does the disk have? Does inserting a USB stick do more than you might guess?
This link shows the lengths that some will go to and imagine if there was money in it.
Then there are yet more options, suppose, as now, people take local vote tallies to central offices on a portable storage device of some sort. The aggregating of those results could also have corruption built in.
The problem with a computer is that so much is hidden. The Chinese even built hardware bugs into SuperMicro motherboards, for instance.