Blockchain and Fair elections

 Excerpt from

https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important-invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169

 I Won the Popular Vote

How about voting?

We have tons of problems with voting today that we’ve hedged against in advanced democracies and completely failed to deal with in banana republics, third world countries and authoritarian regimes the world over.

• How many people voted?
• Did they already vote?
• Was their vote recorded properly?
• Did their vote reflect their intention?
• How can we audit it all later, easily and quickly?
• Can we trust that audit?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s also the little problem of counting those votes accurately. Even in 2017, that’s fraught with error, subject to the the honesty of the vote counters and the checks and balances in the systems to prevent fraud. We also have proprietary voting machines that we can’t publicly audit or trust, where countless failures in the chain of custody of the machine could see the votes altered.

Blockchains can change all that by ensuring that votes are provably correct and publicly auditable.

What we’ll see in the not too distant future is the merger of what’s called E2E voting systems (end-to-end verifiable voting, and blockchain-based systems.

E2E means that everyone in the entire population, down to the individual voter, can verify the results. Every individual knows his or her vote was recorded accurately and they can check it themselves. They don’t have to trust someone to tell them it was correct like we do today. They can also see that everyone else cast their vote with certainty. But despite this amazing transparency, it still preserves the all-important secrecy of ballots, which prevents coercion and group-think.

Today we can’t do any of that (other than keep ballots secret). We can generally attest to the integrity of elections but we can’t prove it, which is why a certain person who won an election recently sometimes claims he won the popular vote by two million. E2E changes that. Politicians may not like it, because they have a stake in being able to say the votes are rigged, but too bad for them, because the rest of us want absolute voting integrity.