Now I’m just a dumb yokel, but wouldn’t a block chain, a digital ledger be the ideal way to record votes, to curate and make changes to a living document (like amending the constitution) democratically? As long as each sender has a unique ID#, something something hashes, blocks, chains, mutable ledger, will of the people decentralized ect… ect…
How impossible is that idea?
I think this would make the voting system even more susceptible to attack, imagine a 51% attack on the voting system.
There’s your problem. The moment it goes live, the system will be spammed mercilessly by criminals, including political lobby-groups, with fake ID’s, trying to “vote” for their interests. That’s the reason you can’t access voting machines online (and rightly so!).
Each person has a unique SSN.
Edit: how big of an alphanumeric code would each person need to memorize to make brute forcing a password unfeasible?
2nd edit: What if the alphanumeric code you memorized was just a key to a wallet, kept locally, inside the wallet could be your actual ID# of any size.
Which is a number. It may have letters or other characters in its human-readable form, but these are digitally represented as numbers. Numbers can be forged by computers. Hackers (black and white!) do it every time they attempt to gain access to another computer. It’s the core definition of the device: a computer is a programmable calculator/number cruncher.
The risks are serious enough that Gov’ts all over the world reject the idea outright, as the expected abuse level is more damaging then in their current voting system.
Not to mention global bad actors that want to see the election go their way!
there is no technical issue to this at all.
the problem is people. just yesterday i was at the grocery store behind a not exceedingly old lady that was writing a check to pay for her groceries.
we could tie this to your phone number and SSN, with birthday and address, all bound to your phone, or a fob, or your thumb print. But half of this country would fight it tooth and nail. so accommodations for the lowest common denominator would be made. That is what we have now.
I hear you, people are stubborn and set in their ways. And this is just a pretty broad statement, but if you can’t figure out multi-factor authentication, and understand the need for it, should you even be voting in the first place…?
Congratz, you just said 99% of people shouldn’t vote.
Voting is a basic human right. It shouldn’t require any prior knowledge to perform the action itself. Knowledge of the canidates/issues is different.
I already don’t trust the system.
How convenient.
Not confident blockchain would make it any better, but I’m open to explanations as to why it would.
Instead of voting on a candidate, vote on the issue it self, you don’t have to vote on it but you could. Vote on the issue/ bill/ law/ election/ whatever and the consenting opinion is what’s added to the block chain. That’s the living mutable document, a decentralized record of the vote, the will of the people.
I’m not sure that fits the character and intent of the US political system, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, not a direct democracy; there is a concept of “tyranny of the majority” that the founding fathers wanted to avoid.
edit: ^^ why we probably wouldn’t want to vote enmasse on specific issues as opposed to candidates, at least on federal level.
it scares me the things people say. i recently heard someone in a government office say ‘i want a paper ballot because paper is unhackable’.
it does not matter what technical issue you solve, there will always be a better idiot.
Don’t get me started on that can or worms! 
Suffice to say the current US political system is broken, probably beyond repair and a better, more democratic system should be put in place. Look up “proportional representation” in the context of a federal system. It works, several European states can attest to that.
I feel like all political systems are cans of worms, at the end of the day someone’s interests are taking a back seat to someone else’s in large scale politics.
The only solution is anarchy! jkjkjk
The most exciting political system to me is what seasteading brings, think dynamically federalizable states; don’t like the dumb laws your current government is implementing, get together with a bunch of neighbors and break off and implement your own laws.
As @twin_savage said, that’s a direct democracy.
Having all the people vote for every issue is not feasible, because everyone would need to spend every hour of every day being informed about all the decisions and also making them.
IDK about you but as a citizen I don’t want to piss away all my valuable time on this Earth doing that.
That is why we elect people to take care of job for us.
Per the following government site there are currently 9,640 bills and resolutions currently before Congress alone.
If you spent only 60 seconds reading, comprehending, and voting on the bill that would total 160.66 hours solid.
Do you really expect ~160,000,000 people to vote that many times? We can barely get 50% of the people to vote once a year.
Which would account for a total of 25,705,600,000 hours of labor spent collectively by the American people on voting alone in our scenario above if we went the direct democracy route.
Times that by the federal minimum wage and we get $186,365,600,000 of wasted labor.
In summary; having voting on the blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
@TFresh not trying to dunk on you personally.
Your exact question is something I’ve thought a lot about so I’m trying to answer it to the fullest extent that I know of.
Lets say hypothetically we did vote using the block chain and the technical issues were solved. If a bill is a 1000 pages of legal jargon with a bunch of shit hidden in it, I just vote no or don’t vote at all. You said it, we can barely get 50% of the people to vote once a year. If people don’t want to be involved in the processes of government, they don’t have to be, you could be as involved as you want to be.
I appreciate it, lets be real it’s a shot it the dark, I do enjoy the discussion though, it’s really interesting to hear others have thought about the same problem. And if a better yet undiscovered system of governance exists, shouldn’t we continuously look for and talk about it?
think of what happened with NFTs. That would have been the PERFECT system to replace the centuries old housing deeds, land sales, vehicle registration, cemetery plotting, and any other paper record. What happened with it? it got turned into a scammy get rich quick mechanism that gave it and crypto a bad (worse?) name.