Loading ...Game Changer – USPS Filed For Patent For Blockchain Voting
This could be a real game changer for ensuring integrity of elections. Anyone here who really knows blockchain, what are your thoughts about how safe and hack proof something like this might be.?https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/usps-just-filed-patent-blockchain-based-secure-voting-system
There need to be paper ballots with public viewing of the counting process.
There was plenty of voting fraud with paper ballots, but I think much less than before for some reason (I have my suspicions why, and I think you do too) they were replaced. The tricks for altering paper ballots and stealing them were well known. People need to go back to them before the tricks of fraud detection are forgotten, before the ballot counters have retired or died.
Of course, there are much larger problems with elections than the voting process, but paper ballots are tried and relatively true.
Let other methodologies be tried first on, say, beauty contests or sports gambling for a few years to decades to centuries first to check for glitches.
If I understand it correctly it is paper ballots sent by mail. The blockchain is used to make sure that only legitimate registered voters are voting. Eliminate dead voters, fake identities etc. that would stuff the ballot box.
I like that tampering with the mail is a federal offense as a backstop. How this all ties together with a blockchain is still fuzzy to me. They would have to take the ballot and put it into data form. Assuming that can’t be “hanging chad” I would trust this more than a voting machine. 🙂
There may come a time, and perhaps all too soon, when overlords totally rule, having wrecked independent thinking. Just about no one will care about much of anything, absolutely including privacy or independent thought or choice, even those who are potentially intelligent.
The best defense in the mean time, I believe, is as much transparency and individual independence as possible, in as many places as possible. That means everyone understands as much as possible, including voting, even if voting is voting in what is currently generally an electoral charade. The stupid need to understand. The overworked parent with too many screaming kids too. The person on drugs late for work. The nitwit interested mainly in household decor. Everyone, whether you like them or not–they all need to understand. they need to know as much about voting as possible, all details, in my opinion. They need to understand each detail of the process from A to Z. They need to be able to log in and watch the counting via camera or if they prefer walk in — at least some, chosen by lottery — to watch in person to make sure that what the camera is showing is not faked, and showing it themselves. They need to be able to witness people coming in to vote to see whether they are intimidated, whether subtly or not, and to serve as witnesses.
It can’t be “fuzzy” to much of anyone.
There will be imperfections of course. There will be need for absentee ballots for some and the like. But the problems with mailed in voting, such as “voting parties” at work* rigid privacy are huge. Any movements away from the tried and fairly true I think should be slow and as transparent as possible. Maybe what has been patented is. I did not study it.
(* People overgeneralize to imagine that only “conservatives” or “rightists” only worry about such things. I read about the abusive practice of “voting parties” in a comments section in a hard-left type of site.)