Elon Musk calls for an end to electronic voting.
(twitter.com)
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I don't think I am the one missing the point here.
I will try and make things simple for you. Imagine the blockchain records indicated that Biden got 100,000 votes and Trump got 200,000. Who won the election?
Biden did by 200,000 votes to 100,000.
See how it works and not a single blockchain record chain was hurt in this example!
What. No.
This doesn't make any sense man. I don't think this is worth discussing with you frankly. We can agree to disagree for various reasons and leave it at that.
“If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.” ― Satoshi Nakamoto
Wait, I think the fog is clearing. I was thinking about storing each separate ballot, however many sheets of paper that is, as a blockchain record but I think you are talking about storing the entire election as a series of blockchain records.
Am I catching up now?
Would you split it by state or just have one federal blockchain database?
If so, I am going to need another think. I apologise for being so slow.
Think of a blockchainas a PO box system, or a storage facility. Everyone has the key to their own box, or storage, so only they check and see what's inside. You can put a coin in there, or a ballot, doesn't matter.
The whole system can check and tally all of the ballots from all of those PO boxes / storage units, but cannot modify them. Imagine a glass window into the PO box, by the computer forgets what that box had in it after it tallies what it saw.
And the system shows how it tallies up said votes, it's completely transparent in the way that math is done. This is why there's the "crypto" part of "cryptocurrency," it's specifically referencing the cryptography involved in those calculations. If anything interfered with the count, it'd be immediately visible to everyone since the "hash" or "count" would be corrupted. Everyone would instantly see it's corrupted. Like seeing that a master key was used on a unit, but it pings the owner immediately.
So, we have a voting system that the users themselves own and are in control of (these are called wallets in the crypto space), the PO boxes. We have a system which automatically tallies all votes made by those with x metadata (say only those boxes with an ID attached). We can then vote, and verify the count, while ensuring there is no tampering with the votes or the count system.
You could add metadata to each vote based on ID, so state votes and federal vtoes would be quantifiable depending on what you're asking for. "Who voted for who in... Arkansas?" and a display of the votes would come up. No fake votes could be applied because this system requires a valid ID to do so.
Sorry if this is complicated or difficult ot understand. The most basic way to learn about this would be to learn how Bitcoin or other Cryptos store their transactions, blocks, etc. Those are the "reciept lists." Dominion was a centralized service, so back end tomfoolery could happen, because no one could check their work. With decentralized ledgers, everyone can check the work.
Another example via analogy. Imagine a computer system, that when you asked "what did so and so vote for?" the system couldn't answer. But when asked "did so and so vote for x?" it wouldn't answer, it would simply tally the truth of the answer. This is kinda how cryptographic systems work.
Thank you for that. I think I am catching up slowly!
So, are you saying that each voter should use his or her own computer to cast votes? Wouldn't that mean that everyone's computer/phone/tablet would need to download the entire federal database of ballots?
I think there is still a voter ID issue. How would the system know that a voter was valid?
One scam with paper ballots was to collect unused ballots when the polls closed then take them round to someone's house where a group of people would be waiting to fill in thousands of blank ballots. Wouldn't using a machine just make that operation easier?
There is much talk of making errors visible in blockchain systems but what would you do if an error was found while people were still voting? You can't just stop accepting votes until you have things sorted out.
And what happens to the "Proof of Work" idea as used by BitCoin to ensure integrity of the hash codes? If you just take the first response then someone with a massive server farm will win every time and so be able to falsify records? Have I got that right? And what if, like BitCoin, the POW takes ten minutes to add a block? isn't that going to be disruptive?
Several countries have tried internet voting and abandonned it as being insecure.
Or would only the machines in the voting stations have access to the P2P network? I think that might be too easy to corrupt.
Would people actually check their own ballots in the database? If they didn't then they could still be erroneous.
Part of the problem with the US election system is that the results for a POTUS rely on about half a dozen swing states each one of which can be swayed by just one precinct in one county. If you can corrupt the right six machines you can control the outcome.
Sorry, that is a bit of a brain dump!