> With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable.
Could a blockchain not address that with public/private keys? Why is this ridiculous?
So what problem does it solve? What does the blockchain accomplish that a paper ballot does not? And what are the costs in terms of user interface and voter education, relative to paper?
I'm not saying this would be good necessarily, only that such a technology would enable fast, frequent, continuous control distributed across the population. Such a country would be very different from anything that exists today.
Assuming that voting would become effectively free, the second point does sound quite intriguing. It's the sort of direct democracy that is practiced by some countries (e.g. Switzerland). It does require a certain level of voter education though - so people look at the longer term. Otherwise you'll never push through an initiative that raises taxes for example.
To prevent selling of votes, or forced votes via blackmail.
The main issue is the hardware, and added complexity. But these are interesting problems that should be talked about.
Plus we would need culture changes around key management, so that non-tech-literate people can create and protect keys. Which means the people would need some standard for secure hardware to generate keys and sign ballots. Which means we'd need some government standard for "trusted hardware", and that would quickly become an attack vector.
Only after all of that would it be possible for the government to trust votes via public key cryptography. And as Jacob says, the important thing is that the _public_ has trust in the vote, regardless of what government officials believe.