I'm generally pessimistic about the desirability and utility of block chain voting systems.
Spend any amount of time around Bitcoin beginners and the one of the recurring themes will be lost private keys.
And "lost" includes countless thefts through network-based attacks aided and abetted by people conditioned for years to take computer security lightly.
If voting identities are controlled by private keys, then voters will lose their voting rights left and right.
Worse, just because an election is "on a block chain" doesn't mean that voter fraud isn't being committed. For example, buying and selling cryptographic voter identities could become a very lucrative industry.
In addition to all that, pretty sure Ethereum isn't anonymous. Since the public keys are presumably registered with the government can not only tell who you voted for, stuffing the ballot box becomes trivially easy by just registering a bunch of fake public keys for which you control the private keys. Maybe some of these problems could be solved by generating the key at the ballot box & just throwing away the private key, but then I fail to see what addition a blockchain provides as you still need to verify the public keys are valid first.
This looks like a premature assessment. The problem with voting systems are many, and so are the benefits and ways to apply blockchain tech. There are other examples in different comments already, but the most glaring prematurity here sounds like some sort of comparison being made to crypto currency. I honestly don’t understand why you’re doing that or the point you’re making.
For one other example so far unmentioned, mere distribution of public keys (not reliance on them) along with open source decentralized blockchain is grounds for verification far beyond what we have now, which lingers near the zero mark. Why would we complain about that?
The simple answer is to combine blockchain with legacy methods of verifying that votes aren't sold or double voting occurs. So that probably still means going to a physical polling location for the forseeable future. The use of blockchain tech wouldn't initially replace that, it would just provide a 100% accurate paper and open trail of the vote.
> I can almost hear the screams of terror from the Democratic party in the U.S. as I type those words. They know they’ll never win a national or state-wide election again without ballot stuffing, voter bussing and illegal immigrants voting multiple times.
It's hard to take such a blog seriously when they cannot refrain from even the most captious of emotional remarks.
Using an existing program called Active Citizen, the city of Moscow has been allowing residents to cast votes for measures ranging from the name of their new metro train to the color of the seats in a new sports arena.
Why is this even on the front page? This is not Russia... moving towards a transparent, functioning democratic system.
Yeah, the whole article reads as if from another planet :) . Disregarding known problems of electronic voting, which aren't mentioned here - what Russia he's talking about? What fair elections could be on federal level or in Moscow these days?..
Is voting even a thing in Russia? I thought it was "place your x next to Putin or one of his friends if you don't want to find yourself in a Siberian Gulag".
Yes, voting is a thing in Russia. No, you won't find yourself in Siberian Gulag (what is it?). Just because most of Russia citizens chose Putin doesn't mean that there's something wrong with voting. He's considered by most people as best president of Russia since Stalin, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Russian people like him (and, of course, enemy governments trying to paint him black, because he's not bowing before them anymore).
IT crowd, of course, won't agree. Well, too bad, because minority does not dictate to majority in democracy. Before US elections it was hard to find anyone who would be pro-Trump, everyone was liberal. It gave the impression that Clinton should have 99% of votes. Well, it didn't work that way, it turned out that there are a lot of citizens who voted for Trump, even if they didn't post a lot on hacker news. It's the same with Putin. Older people vote for him. Government and state workers vote for him. Businessmen vote and support him. Of course few loud liberals will shout everywhere about unfair elections, but it doesn't mean that they are really unfair. Putin's support is enormous in Russia, like it or not. You may call it brainwash or whatever, it won't help. There's no other leader who worth a vote.
Sorry, I hate political posts, but such naiveté makes me cry. No, there are no Gulags in Russia, if you really think this way, your brain was washed by western propaganda even more than average Russian's brain.
[+] [-] apo|8 years ago|reply
Spend any amount of time around Bitcoin beginners and the one of the recurring themes will be lost private keys.
And "lost" includes countless thefts through network-based attacks aided and abetted by people conditioned for years to take computer security lightly.
If voting identities are controlled by private keys, then voters will lose their voting rights left and right.
Worse, just because an election is "on a block chain" doesn't mean that voter fraud isn't being committed. For example, buying and selling cryptographic voter identities could become a very lucrative industry.
[+] [-] vlovich123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gt_|8 years ago|reply
For one other example so far unmentioned, mere distribution of public keys (not reliance on them) along with open source decentralized blockchain is grounds for verification far beyond what we have now, which lingers near the zero mark. Why would we complain about that?
[+] [-] jameslevy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparky_|8 years ago|reply
It's hard to take such a blog seriously when they cannot refrain from even the most captious of emotional remarks.
[+] [-] vr46|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fncypants|8 years ago|reply
Why is this even on the front page? This is not Russia... moving towards a transparent, functioning democratic system.
[+] [-] avmich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hitekker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joejerryronnie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbezhenar|8 years ago|reply
IT crowd, of course, won't agree. Well, too bad, because minority does not dictate to majority in democracy. Before US elections it was hard to find anyone who would be pro-Trump, everyone was liberal. It gave the impression that Clinton should have 99% of votes. Well, it didn't work that way, it turned out that there are a lot of citizens who voted for Trump, even if they didn't post a lot on hacker news. It's the same with Putin. Older people vote for him. Government and state workers vote for him. Businessmen vote and support him. Of course few loud liberals will shout everywhere about unfair elections, but it doesn't mean that they are really unfair. Putin's support is enormous in Russia, like it or not. You may call it brainwash or whatever, it won't help. There's no other leader who worth a vote.
Sorry, I hate political posts, but such naiveté makes me cry. No, there are no Gulags in Russia, if you really think this way, your brain was washed by western propaganda even more than average Russian's brain.