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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

Votecoin. Just as bitcoin makes it hard to post fraudulent transactions despite the lack of a central authority, votecoin would do the same for elections. The protocol would have to (1) make it extremely difficult to cast a fraudulent vote and (2) avoid relying on a central authority.

Such a protocol is possible if you think about it, but you have to be creative ;-)

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This is a great idea for third-world countries and questionable democracies. Afghanistan, Iraq and the upcoming Jeb Bush election in America.

> and the upcoming Jeb Bush election in America.

HA!!

I live in a third-world country (Greece). The problem is not fraud. They don't need that. Corrupted politicians (ruling for 40 years here, without any real problems) buy votes prior to the elections. From 20 (EUR) to 50 per vote. Now that we're in the middle of a financial crisis even 12 to 15 per vote could work. In the villages you can get an entire family to vote (~ 4-5 votes) for 2Lt of fresh oil. In the cities are either bought or exchanged for a future job as a public servant (hard to do these days, but still...)

This. I live in Serbia and it's the same thing. They approach you as you're entering a voting location and offer you as little as €20 in exchange for a vote, and they ask you to take a smartphone photo of the voting piece of paper (dunno the right term in English) as proof.

Not to draw discussion to political affairs, but literally nobody I personally know has ever expressed nothing but contempt for the currently leading party here, yet they have amassed over 50% of all the votes on the latest elections. I suspect a lot of it was via these methods. So a fraud-intolerant voting system would help, but not tremendously so.

See? Now imagine with something bitcoinesque. They will ask you hashes, etc. Then they will use software to measure votes on the fly :-)

ps. There's no software that can fix a rogue voter.

Check this out, I think it's going for something similar: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/projects/commitcoin/

How can you achieve vote secrecy with this system? Not being able to prove you voted for X, even if you wanted to, is one of the most important parts of electoral democracies.

There are several methods that allow this. I disagree with all of them, since I believe transparency is more important than anything else in an electoral process, and even the simplest is beyond comprehension of about 1/4 of voters, and beyond the effort to comprehend of about 3/4.

Anonymity is not the hard part---the challenge lies in verifying that an account from which a vote was cast is legitimate. But it is possible.

Alongside secrecy, I wonder how you prevent people from selling their votes in this system. It could be a much bigger problem than it currently is because of the ease with which someone could do it.

That is actually a brilliant idea. I like it.

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