I want to describe what I was imagining when I asked about users applying ‘conditional statements’ to their votes. The use of conditional statements such as “vote for Adam if Louise is in the lead, else vote for Louise” would allow users to create complex structure to their vote in order to describe how they wish to vote under various circumstances. There are some advantages to this kind of automation, depending upon whether/how it can be implemented. Firstly, it would be convenient for the user to be able to set up their vote and forget about it. More importantly, if we could achieve this kind of ‘smart vote’ there is the possibility to establish a new level of transparency into people’s true preferences. It would be very informative to be able to have visibility into how people would truly feel under all possible situations. I’m talking about circumstances such as described by @modprobe here:
There is an advantage with a ‘smart voting’ system with ‘conditional statements’ over the basic system of manually changing votes ad hoc. It could mean that we are all able to see how people really feel about all aspects of the vote, without having to make inferences based on the manual switching of votes stimulated by the pseudo-random changing of circumstances.
I’m having trouble communicating this in an elegant way but I hope you can understand what I’m getting at.
One problem is how to resolve ‘smart votes’ given their fluid nature. I’m sure there’s a way around it, but haven’t thought about it much yet.
Now, I’m not sure if I’m making sense. Does what I’m saying sound right?
It gives another point of view on the subject. Very worth reading entirely.
Imho, paper , fabric curtains, transparent voting boxes and humans to monitor the process , do the job. I think making the process faster / cheaper with technology is not a valid path.
You can use the blockchain to secure the votes, but how do you enable voting in the first place, how do you prevent the same people voting multiple times?
That’s the primary issue I see with such a design. If everyone votes “if Bob is winning, vote for Alice. If Alice is winning, vote for Bob” then no winner can be chosen. We can support arbitrary voting and tallying semantics as long as they can be unambiguously serialized and tallied. Having votes which change value based on the tally may not be possible to tally unambiguously.
The article is interesting, and I’ll have to think about it more before I say much; however, I will say that at present I do not think the answer to this issue is to reduce the information people have available to them. That’s at least as manipulative as biasing the information they have. And, of course, any approach that is based on controlling the masses (including regulating search engines) in an attempt to prevent control of the masses is completely invalid as it is, on its face, doing exactly what it claims to be preventing.
First the user generates a key pair (the ID key) and proves their identity to one or more ID verifiers chosen by the organization running the selection. The verifier broadcasts a blockchain transaction certifying that the ID key belongs to a unique and authorized voter. The user then proceeds through our registration protocol to get a second key pair (the voting key) certified to vote such that no one (server operators or election officials included) can determine which voter owns the voting key. The voting key can then sign vote transactions, and anyone can tally them by processing the blockchain using our open source software.
Sure, but different use cases call for different functionality. If MaidSAFE were using our software to do polls, people might want complex votes: “If feature X is popular, I want feature Y with it; but if feature X isn’t popular, I only want feature Z.” And this is a community who might find such complex voting semantics desirable. Of course, well designed software will make easy things easy, too. Political voting may have no use for such functionality, but we are targeting far more than political voting.
Some of the beauty of Follow My Vote’s system is how there’s so much flexibility when it comes to implementation. It could easily be used at traditional polling stations. The voter could simply press a button instead of putting a cross. It almost entirely removes the possibilities of corruption and accidental error in vote counting, because it’s all verifiable. The voter could check that their individual vote was counted by simply referencing their private key against the publicly available blockchain (or equivalent). It would also eliminate the time and financial costs of counting votes.
Sponsorship is the current downfall. Vote buying may be hard to prove, its generally illegal in the US and most are smart enough not to do it under any reasonable circumstances.