Elections on the blockchain?

Look at the current state of America. Donald Trump has been baselessly saying that there has been voter fraud and the system is rigged against him. He has produced zero proof of this and yet people still believe him – culminating in the recent acts of domestic terrorism at the US Capitol.

Increasingly, I’ve been thinking that America needs to lead the way in adopting blockchain technology for their voting system. Yes, I understand that there is going to need to be a massive increase in education for the populous in order for them to get on board with this idea but I think its worth it for the future of democracy.

They currently have no trust in their trust-based voting system whereas the blockchain is trust-less by design. Meaning no trust is needed for the system to run. The immutable ledger assures consensus across the system therefore trust is not needed and it’s all encrypted and based on cryptography so its secure.

How it would work – when a vote is cast it would be transmitted to a network of P2P computers scattered across the country. The network then solves equations to confirm the validity of the vote. Once confirmed as legitimate, votes are grouped together into blocks then the blocks are chained together creating a history of all the legitimate votes cast. As a copy of the ledger is stored on all the computers in the network they hold each other accountable, so if a bad actor tries to cheat the system it will be reject if the entries don’t match across the network. This would eliminate vote suppression as each eligible voter would have an address assigned and an address acts like a fingerprint, it’s unique and traceable to you.

Depending the execution logistics, this could help with lowering the barrier to entry as voter may not need to travel to remote polling stations and wait in huge queues.

Just food for thought. I’m sure smarter people than me will point out the flaws.