It would be interesting to organize unofficial elections, say for US president, and see how they are different from official results.
Funny you'd mention that...
https://followmyvote.com/parallel-presidential-election-2016/ 
@modprobe I just talked to Max Kaye (VoteFlux) and they only use the blockchain to record the votes, most of the part happens off-chain. They have chosen the bitcoin blockchain because it's the most secure chain regarding network consensus and costs to attack the network.
Depending on what one means by "most", I suppose most of ours happens off-chain too?... but we do put more on chain than simply the votes, as that's not secure or auditable. It doesn't help to protect the votes from tampering if I can just stuff them with shills.

I would also argue that Bitcoin isn't particularly difficult to attack at this point (especially for government-backed actors) as a 51% attack requires compromising... two Chinese servers? Proof of Work has made you weak, Bitcoin... Now, I don't claim BitShares would withstand a government-backed attack either, but it should at least be harder to attack due to higher decentralization.