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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

The keys aren’t known to an individual. They are used as a way for citizens to confirm that their vote was counted.

An example- go to the poll. Cast a vote and get a print out with a private key.

Go home and check the blockchain to make sure your vote is recorded. If your vote is missing, report somewhere official with your sheet of paper.

There’s lots of variations, but anonymity is only given up if your vote is missing. Then you just vote again. Smart contracts make sure your original lost vote can’t be applied.

The US needs something like this because currently our digital voting leave no record and there’s no way for an individual to confirm their vote was counted accurately.

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> Cast a vote and get a print out with a private key. Go home and check the blockchain to make sure your vote is recorded.

Apart from the problem that this enables vote buying or coercion, it also:

(a) is a good use for a public database, but putting that public database on the blockchain is just a useless complication of things; and

(b) only addresses part of the problem: yes, any voter's vote is counted; but is everything that's counted an actual person's unique vote? That is, this doesn't protect against ballot stuffing by multiple voting or by simply faking database entries.

Overall, not a terribly good approach, and even if it were, no need to "blockchain" it.

a) it’s really inefficient, but necessary to make sure every vote is counted. It’s not a database per se, just a record.

b) I don’t think vote stuffing is solved by blockchain as that requires more work at polling site, audit of voting software, etc. but that’s an existing problem that is a higher risk by citizens not knowing if their vote is counted. A blockchain voting solution doesn’t solve all problems, just some of them.

There are likely better approaches. I was just responding to the question of how this could help and why useful since someone upstream was worried about anonymity.

> it’s really inefficient, but necessary to make sure every vote is counted. It’s not a database per se, just a record.

I don't see why it would be necessary to have a blockchain. It would work just as well for the election authority to publish the official database of all votes and everybody ensuring that their vote is in that database.

> There are likely better approaches. I was just responding to the question of how this could help and why useful since someone upstream was worried about anonymity.

Right. The approach with a personal verification key is a good one.

What if I don’t trust the election authority? Having a public ledger as each vote is recorded is really powerful (or a smart contract for all votes to be countable whenever polls close).

It would also reduce the ability to pad with votes after the fact. Would help for analysis of any abnormalities (eg, five times population voting, stuff like that).

I think it becomes more useful the less trustworthy the government (eg, Russia).

It also means that you can prove to others that you voted the "right" thing. With all its implications.

That’s intentional in the US, otherwise people would sell votes or get coerced to vote.

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