Topic: Bitcoin techniques useful for real democratic votes? (Read 1072 times)

Yeah... its a challenging topic and i really would love if bitcoin and the cryptography around could solve this problem. I mean we really need a change to democracy that really deserves the name. If there could be a system and hacker communities and pirate parties (pirate parties first members come from hacker clubs very often too) then this could be a big advertising for bitcoin too. I mean pirate parties are a worldwide phenomenon, the first party that exists in so many countries, and if they present such a voting system then...

I wonder if i should ask about this topic in bitcoin foundation.

Ya, that is key. Getting the address to each person voting. I did think in a government situation you could have them printed out on cards or CDs or whichever and handed out at the polling station. Each station would have the amount for their amount of voters, when someone comes in they can grab from the stack and go vote. Though it also allows for the person to show proof to someone later on which way they voted which could lead to people buying votes.

But like I said, it's not set up for choosing your new master. I will leave others to deal with that. BitPools moves beyond that, allowing you to vote with your bitcoins on things you want funded.

Playing devils advocate... if a government would use this technique then the government would know which person got which address. So they would know afterwards which person voted a certain way. In certain countries you would get in trouble from this point if you voted for opposition.

Next thing would be that nobody knows if every address was really sent to a real person. For example you add a certain amount of addresses for old users and government could raise the amount of votes for ruling parties because they could keep those addresses and vote themself. It would be risky to steal votes because even if government would be sure that a person that got an address sent, is dead, you never know that someone could find out that dead were voting. Or how to ensure that really the real receivers of the address are voting. There were cases were letter voting cards from workers of a local company were used by the company to vote for the local companies boss's daugther so she gets in local parliament. To have power to make decisions for the company again.

So i think the part from votes till checking if votes are correctly counted are fine. Only how to know that the votes are valid are a bit difficult. Ok, nowadays offline votes arent perfect in that matter too. You cant really say that the real voters voted by letter, for example. They lower the risk a bit by counting the votes in small areas first and then send the results to the bigger parts of the votes. So citizens of the small area could see if the votes are strange. More votes than voters or completely different votes than the people would have voted.
The thing most hackers and pirate parties fear the most is the might of the one operating the voting process. Centralized data... and making wrong things with them.

I summarized it briefly here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/5000th-post-how-i-use-the-bitcoin-blockchain-for-voting-869839

Each voter is given a bitcoin address. The list of addresses is encrypted and made available. After the vote, the decryption key is released.
Nobody knows who has what address. But they know the amount of people voting and the amount of addresses matches up to that number.
You can verify the bitcoins sent via the blockchain very easily, anyone can count the votes and you can verify your address is counted.

Can you explain how you sat this up? Would your system be able to meet the requirements of Anonymity (because government should not know how you, personally, vote) and Verifiability (because if votes are collected in a database then its possible to change the votes, if you can count the real votes then this isnt possible).


The state is a conspiracy of some kind at the moment. Though its still better than some single mighty person that can rule how he wishes. But its still not nearly perfect because governments, who should be the focus of citizens will, are doing what they want. Too often against the will of the citizens.

At the end the government should be "the citizens", which mean they are the ones that rule and say whats going to happen.

I think this is the way forward.  I am hoping for a day where much of the administration of government is relegated to the blockchain and people vote directly on the blockchain  about governmental policies and therefore change the governments rulesets and make up new rulesets directly for the people and by the people instantly with their vote. 

I have solved voting using the Bitcoin blockchain at bitpools.com. Using Bitcoin it becomes the most secure voting mechanism in the world.

I did not, however, set it up so that you are just voting for a new master.

It is set up so that you can vote for how your money is spent, using your money as your vote.

I mean especially if someone has an idea how this can be done in detail.

I doubt anarchism is a way for the future. People are probably thousands of years away of being able to life that way. Even nowadays anarchists use things produced by others though mostly dont produce much of worth from their side. If everyone would life like those anarchists try to life then it would not work definitely.

I am not so sure about Bitcoin per se, but I see a lot of voting procedures switching over to the blockchain in the future. 

As far as blockchain technology goes, it seems like it can completely revolutionize the way voting takes place. 

I see a big move in the next decade away from traditional voting systems to blockchain voting and with the additional features and functions that the blockchain can bring even a revolution in the way people think about voting itself. 

I think about the usefulness of the bitcoin techniques for real democratic votes since a long time. Im a fan of democracy, not the pseudo-democracy we see in most countries where people vote one day in 4 years and for the rest of the time they delegate their voting rights to others. Thats not demo-cracy, which means "ruling of the citizens". Its even worse in the US where only the biggest part of the citizens get a representation at the end. Other countries have borders for parties, so if a party dont get enough votes, for example only under 5% of voters, then the whole party gets no place in parliament.

This is only a homeopatic demo-cracy. A democracy diluted so far that its not even there anymore practically. The only solution i see for this is a real democracy where each citizen can vote on practically everything. The only problem is the voting system.

The US and other countries use voting computers. Closed source and insecure. You never know what will happen with your vote and if youre really counted. Thats the reason why even pirate parties all over the world dont see computers as the solution. They say a vote cant be made anonymous and replicable. Either the votes are collected in a database and can be altered because they are anonymous or the vote isnt anonymous.

Today i find this article here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239809 in the android app bitcoin buzz. And i was remembered on this topic. I dont see how the author intends to solve the problems though.

What do you guys think about the bitcoin techniques. Can they be a solution and a way to real democratic votes? If so how? I really would like to see a solution.