[thinkloop]

The criticisms in the videos do not appropriately counter the solution in the linked article. Scott's superficial discussion of blockchain at the end misses the entire ethos of blockchain. We agree that servers, devices, software and networks cannot be trusted, and possibly never will be. So we ignore them and instead rely solely on the output. Every stakeholder audits the final official "blockchain" (for lack of a better term) using their own tools, engineers, and techniques to verify its credibility. I'm not claiming that this has been solved, although Belenios seems damn close. But it definitely seems conceivable that we can one day come up with a functional scheme that distrusts the machines as a first principle. What specific problems do you see with the Belenios attempt?

[flanked-evergl]

Blockchains are only verifiable and reliable in so far as everything that exists exits in the blockchain. As soon as it interfaces with the real world you start hitting the Oracle problem [1]. That you are not aware of this and still push for even considering it as an alternative to paper ballots is part of the problem. We need constitutional amendments that ban all forms of electronic voting in every democracy.

[1]: https://chain.link/education-hub/oracle-problem

[thinkloop]

The main issue is that centralized electronic systems can be hacked at scale. That's what the paper solves, it slows everything down making it difficult compromise results en-masse. Verification is much simpler and cheaper than voting itself, and can be distributed. A distrusting community, for example, can build their own easily auditable tools, running on their own random machines, to verify the integrity of their community's votes. Thousands of communities around the country can do the same - again each using completely independent hardware, software and networks, all of which would have to be hacked. You may also be overlooking that we have the benefit of a reliable root of trust in the form of manually provided government documents and IDs that are carefully provisioned. You think in 10,000 years it will still be impossible to run a vote electronically?