I don’t see how paper ballots are inherently any kind of secure, though. A paper ballot system centralizes the potential for corrupt influence in vote counters miscounting votes, voting locations not sending votes, various shenanegains with voting not representing the size of a population due to legacy systems implemented to ease the burden of physical vote counting, etc etc.
I think people really overestimate the security of paper ballot voting. It has as many cheap, hacky workarounds as would be required for a much more robust blockchain voting system.
Fraud can be assumed to be the responsibility of the voter; One person, one voting key, and if they see suspicious activity, they can phone in and report it as stolen to get a new key. No different here from a credit card, bank card, or any other system of authentication. It’s a non-issue in the sense that we already have solutions to this that work well enough.
Anonymity isn’t really required at every stage, either. You can issue cryptographic keys anonymously enough that it would be very difficult to track who voted for who, and it’s not like it’s impossible to find out with paper ballots.
Coercion is also a complete non issue top to bottom, since it could only effectively work in a family setting, and could only extend so far as the present family at a given residence. This would barely outweigh noise, and simple clerical errors in the vast array of very flawed human people that comprise the current system of voting will and likely do introduce more noise than this.
The 51% problem is… Only a problem if you accept unsigned/invalid votes, and citizens have no means to validate and correct their vote during the voting period, which is easily solved simply by having a long voting window in which there is a longer period where votes are “locked” and can only be changed by someone declaring the vote under their name as fraudulent, and providing identification manually to override the digital anonymous vote.
I think people underestimate the number of problems that already exist with voter fraud and with the current flawed electoral system.(which, haha, is fundamentally flawed, as it centralizes debate into a false dichotomy of left and right)
That, or there be a lot of imperial propaganda on the internet. Which, there is, for sure, but it’s often hard to tell which is legitimate and which is just people playing along.
Decentralized blockchain-validated voting on individual issues of concern is a much more robust system than what we have. The problem is that the people in control of every aspect of information in your life don’t particularly like when people can’t be easily controlled.
As is, society functions less as a way of distributing resources and resolving conflicts for a large scale population, and more as a way of controlling a large population and their resources for the benefit of a small number of people. It’s all closer to feudalism or monarchy than democracy still.
