Oh. Umm. OK, I didn’t realize you were envisioning some grueling in-person distribution of the keys. Key theft can also be a problem, but I guess this does temper some of the concerns about mass fraud.
That said, I’m going to shift here and agree with the other posters who are arguing that this is unnecessarily complicated.
Consider an alternate scenario. What we have now, where people walk in, get verified by non-partisan election officials, and sign a paper ballot, is not that different from what you’re describing with the key distribution except the paper ballots are “difficult” to count. And when I say difficult, I don’t actually think it’s that hard but it can’t be done by the public and the numbers do seem to fluctuate slightly during recounts. Let’s tweak this scenario slightly – the government creates a PKI root key and distributes digital signature tokens to each polling station. When someone walks in and gets verified to vote, instead of doing it on paper and physically signing it, they do it electronically and it gets digitally signed by the polling station’s key. This digitally-signed but now-anonymous ballot is then published publicly where anyone with access to the polling station’s public key can verify it and do their own count.
Does this not accomplish the same thing without having to generate thousands of private keys and worry about distributing them in person under the watchful eye of observers?
How long are these keys going to be? You do realize that most of the time public/private keys are quite long sequences of essentially gibberish.
So, you are adding one more step in voting, transcribing a couple/few hundred digit key that is not necessarily going to be using all characters easily found on a keyboard.
Any mistake means that they have to start over.
Plus, as far as proving your vote, you have this piece of paper that you are going to need to hold onto. It is not likely that you are going to be able to commit it to memory.
So, when your friend/boss/spouse/bully/payor asks to see your vote, you are going to need to pull out your voting card, with your unique key on it. It’s going to be hard to memorize your own key, and you expect that people will memorize a separate key after they research to find a ballot that conforms to expectations?
Nothing. What stops people from voting the way someone tells them to? What stops people from handing over mail-in ballots? The blockchain doesn’t solve that problem, but the problem exists in the current system as well.
This scheme does not in any way minimize the need for trust people do not currently have for the government-it definitely increases it, because you are telling people to trust the government that they already do not trust because it is now using science(refer back to post #57).
Not the same at all, because no matter how much pressure is put on a person to vote one way, they can still vote any way they choose then lie about it. This option is taken away using your blockchain tech because the person holding the keys is doing the voting.
After what fact? If it’s published immediately where anyone can see it… when is the time for tampering? The number of votes received by each polling station is public and can be verified.
Sure. Personally I don’t think it’s necessary but the current system already allows for plenty of distrust if you don’t trust that the government is maintaining accurate voter roles and correctly using them to verify voters.
The “research” takes exactly 10 seconds on any web site that can examine the votes - unless it is some really fringe candidate, but then I am sure there will be searches built into those sites that will bring up all the keys that were transferred to any candidate. Just pick one.
Not if it is a mail-in ballot. The whole state of Oregon does it that way, today.
After you vote, discard your private key (you don’t need it anymore). And hide your public key and substitute another that voted the way someone pressured you to vote.
If the actual voting isn’t done in person, then where are you putting these observers? You can’t track where the keys go after they are handed out, so having observers during the distribution is less than useless. Like ticket scalping, where people that have no intention of attending an event pick up tickets to hand to a scalper, blockchain tech will create “keyscalpers”.