PaulSnow t1_itrif3f wrote on October 25, 2022 at 7:42 PM

Reply to comment by TheOfficialACM in I am the co-author behind ACM’s TechBrief on Election Security: Risk-limiting Audits. Ask me anything about election security! by TheOfficialACM

My point really isn't about counting or verifying votes, but the monitoring of processes. Of course, being in the blockchain myself, I've focused on creating cryptographic proofs of sequences of events, and gathering all those proofs into summaries (block hashes if you will).

Allowing the logging of all the processes behind voting (the set up, poll, venue, setup, voting machine configurations), observers, workers, video, etc.) all to the blockchain, you end up with time sequences and actions that create responsibilities. Failures in process can't be hidden.

I feel actual voting and ballots don't gain much from the blockchain, though there are ways to use the blockchain for voting. The real gain is to audit the execution of the election.

Public blockchains are much more complex than your description, and do allow for selecting authorities in distributed locations that all contribute to a unified (cryptographically speaking) log of events.

TheOfficialACM OP t1_itrn7r6 wrote on October 25, 2022 at 8:12 PM

A Reddit AMA is the wrong place to get into the finer points of blockchains, cryptocurrency, and/or public bulletin boards.

Suffice to say that one of the core features of most blockchains is consensus, while one of the core features of a public bulletin board is maintaining evidence. Those are emphatically not the same thing, even though many of the same cryptographic techniques (zero knowledge proofs, hash data structures, etc.) are used in both settings.