Author Topic: Could this be used to conduct anonymous polls of congress?  (Read 4631 times)

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Offline modprobe

Hi, merockstar. What you're describing is generally possible, using our one-person-one-vote designs. The tricky parts are making it anonymous *who* voted (anonymizing how they voted is done) because someone always knows which voters registered with the system. If many more voters registered than actually voted, then it's difficult to know who voted at all, but if the same number of people register as vote, then obviously the registrant list is the list of active voters.

The other tricky part is hiding the vote until a quorum is reached. Blockchains are not capable of hiding data; this is simply impossible with all technology I know of. Some people are working on such designs, but I'm not sure if it's even theoretically possible. The usual approximation of this is committing to a hash of your vote, then revealing the real vote later, but this is not always an acceptable substitute because there's no way to force you to reveal your vote later. For your use case, though, there's no need to hide the vote (I think), since all we're interested in is how many voters have an opinion, so the commitment to a hash which is revealed later should work.

Offline Akado

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Was this what you were looking for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcAz9mZW1_c

I guess that works. I was talking about a video with a guest who I cant remember who it was atm. It was around 45 or 50m long if im not mistaken.

There was even an example about what is mentioned in the video. Envelops, that protect the identity of who voted. Paper was folded on top of a table while it was explained. That's all I remember atm.
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Offline Akado

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Would it be possible to verify the results went a certain way without revealing who voted?

There was a video of FMV where they explained how they tech works to someone whose name I can't remember and if I'm not mistaken, that was how they described it. Verifiable voting without exposing who you voted on. Can't find the video though.
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Example:

Say a large majority of the house secretly agree on something that they're afraid to support until they see others supporting it.

Would it be possible for some system to be set up where a representative could verify to the community their identity, then be assigned a key which they can use to express how they feel about a given issue/proposal.

The blockchain then keep this information secret until enough have voted that there's plenty of plausible deniability, then display the result anonymously.

Would it be possible to verify the results went a certain way without revealing who voted?

If so, I feel like this could help promote popular non-status quo issues for which people may be afraid to jump on the bandwagon.