Technology can realize greatly intensified forms of continuous democratic participation, but such applications must be openly developed and publicly owned.
The largest blockers to implementing them for voting are no longer technological, they’re political
We can absolutely cryptographically verify your voting choice from your phone, and have you and everyone be able to verify when it changed, where, on what device, etc, while also preserving the anonymity of the voter.
(Edit: while also making it far easier to combat fraud by making elections trivial enough to go “ok, everyone go check and resubmit your choices!” And immediately validate the majority of the votes as valid, minus those who don’t have internet access who would still need to travel)
Problem is, there are a lot of very powerful organizations who would suddenly lose much of that power if voting were in any way convenient and accessible to everyone.
Every time someone confidently claims that we can cryptographically verify voting, they are deliberately or ignorantly keeping the complexity and necessity of verifying the verifier runtime, the data source, and the communication channels out of the picture.
Cryptography doesn’t solve voting verification problem, it obscures and shifts it.
Believe it or not those are all solved problems
The largest blockers to implementing them for voting are no longer technological, they’re political
We can absolutely cryptographically verify your voting choice from your phone, and have you and everyone be able to verify when it changed, where, on what device, etc, while also preserving the anonymity of the voter.
(Edit: while also making it far easier to combat fraud by making elections trivial enough to go “ok, everyone go check and resubmit your choices!” And immediately validate the majority of the votes as valid, minus those who don’t have internet access who would still need to travel)
Problem is, there are a lot of very powerful organizations who would suddenly lose much of that power if voting were in any way convenient and accessible to everyone.
Every time someone confidently claims that we can cryptographically verify voting, they are deliberately or ignorantly keeping the complexity and necessity of verifying the verifier runtime, the data source, and the communication channels out of the picture.
Cryptography doesn’t solve voting verification problem, it obscures and shifts it.