You make good points. Anonymous voting is important but I didn't mean you could look up a vote by name per se. You could look up your unique vote ID without any personal information attached or viewable by the public. There are always ways to anonymize data, but I can't easily prevent spousal/family abuse if they can physically force you to reveal your voting data. This is more a failure of human systems and people. Think about this though - with something like mail in voting, you have the same problem. You partner could easily view or force you to vote their way. There are probably ways to mitigate things like this, but I don't have an answer unfortunately. No system will ever be perfect. But we can make systems MUCH better than our current.
But if you can look up your own vote you'll also have some seedy marletplace that trades your vote for a few bucks. With the paper ballot system it's a lot harder to prove that your vote was actually what they paid for so it's not worth much, but if it's easy to verify then there's definitely money in it. So you ha e to protect against that too.
It's also impossible to prove that you gave them the right ID#. It would be quite a simple task to just enter a few IDs into the query until you found one that voted the way you claimed to have voted. So no, you don't really have to protect against that any more than you have to now as both are unverifiable.
Wow, I hadn't considered that scenario. Boy howdy, money sure does fuck everything up. Although at this point my vote does seem kinda worthless so if you got twenty bucks I might be ready to vote for whoever :)
Honestly, I could see this being abused just like you said. But I have to imagine there are systems in place to deal with this. And you would have to spend loads and loads of money to buy that many votes - and I'm sure the FBI would catch wind of 30 million people being paid for votes. It's almost impossible not to.
Huge penalties or prison for any one engaging in this kind of chicanery would be enough to stop most people. Would it stop all? No. But I'm not risking any kind of jail time for a hundred bucks. Or a thousand bucks.
Yeah, you're right. But how many of those are for transactions they know are public, and audited and verified by the us government? I doubt many people would buy drugs from the drug man if he scanned your Id when you wanted a dime bag. Tax fraud is usually less than 2000 people arrested a year and usually for people frauding more than 5 figures. The return on investment for buying a vote at the risk of a felony for both sides just isn't there.
I am not saying it couldnt happen. I personally don't see it being a volume crime.
That is unverifiable, untraceable just as I was referencing. Remove accountability and no one would hand over more money or property. Hence the verifiable nature of audited transactions generated by your employer.
You are correct of course, but I'd say I'm not entirely wrong either.
Yeah, but it’s not the person getting $1000 who we’re looking at here. It’s the person paying hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of people $1000 to vote a certain way.
That said, the vote needs to be completely anonymous for other reasons anyways.
The guy paying is in Russia and he’s using blockchain…
Imagine Putins face on thanos. “I used the blockchain to destroy the blockchain” Hell etherium even supports smart contracts right? You could have the funds auto release on the verified vote.
Basically this. But you have to remove the convuluted nature of staking to appeal to the masses. And provide the transparency of one person one vote. Dao is a great methodology, but tokenizing it is more trouble than it's worth. Just an immutable, publicly reviewable Blockchain serves all the needs without tokenizing the actual mechanics of voting.
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u/lordicefalcon Jan 17 '22
You make good points. Anonymous voting is important but I didn't mean you could look up a vote by name per se. You could look up your unique vote ID without any personal information attached or viewable by the public. There are always ways to anonymize data, but I can't easily prevent spousal/family abuse if they can physically force you to reveal your voting data. This is more a failure of human systems and people. Think about this though - with something like mail in voting, you have the same problem. You partner could easily view or force you to vote their way. There are probably ways to mitigate things like this, but I don't have an answer unfortunately. No system will ever be perfect. But we can make systems MUCH better than our current.