Oddbean

The main criticism of blockchain-based voting and online voting in general is that you can’t guarantee the secrecy of the vote. People could be coerced/pressured to vote for a candidate they don’t support or vote could be more easily bought. I think blockchain based voting is a good idea for transparency and auditability but the vote should still take place in person in the voting booth.

I'm not envisioning online voting. I'm talking about in-person, and mail/drop-box voting like we have now. In general, I think the process that currently exists is effective. But there are some relatively simple changes we can make to better inform the public as to how the process works, and how it ensures an accurate tabulation. Additionally, I think there are some changes on the backend we could make to ensure greater fraud protection, and facilitate the rapid and accurate auditing post election to guarantee an accurate contest, and instill confidence in the voters that the election was fair, and the results are accurate.

Mail-in ballots have the same problem of lack of vote secrecy and potential for vote buying that online voting has. The main problems I see with the #ElectionIntegrity process in the US are: mail-in voting (forbidden in most western democracies), tampered/inaccurate voter rolls, opaque electronic counting of the votes, lack of ID verification (in some states). If blockchain-based solution can fix these, that’s great but so far wether US is still a long way to prove that their elections are secured and honest.