India explores blockchain-powered voting but not to enable online elections

India has pondered how blockchain might enhance its elections with a high-level online gabfest concluding that the technology might have a role in making it possible for more voters to cast their ballot in more places around the nation. Indian general elections are famously complex and lengthy: more than 600 million voters …

[tip pc]

“ Chandra envisioned just-in-time printing of ballot papers for absentee voters, with those papers recorded on a blockchain to assist with verification of their existence and the votes they express.”

Surely they only need to verify that a vote has been made, not who voted for who.

Recording who voted for who will surely lead to some despot in the future sending some voters to re-education camps.

[pradeepvasudev]

Some explanation might be useful.

I believe that the reference is to VVPATs (Voter verified paper audit trails). India has had electronic voting for almost two decades now, thru specially manufactured electronic voting machines (EVMs) that are NOT connected to the internet. You vote by pressing a button on one of these machines, which are then taken to a common counting centre for each constituency and the votes per candidate are collected from each of the the machines. But when the BJP was winning more and more seats across every level of government (local, state, central), questions were raised about whether the EVMs have been hacked by the BJP. To ensure that no such thing was happening, VVPATs were introduced in 2019, which allow a voter to verify that his/her vote was not digitally manipulated in favour of someone else. This was pushed by the Supreme Court to ensure voting fairness.

This is what he is probably referring to - how do I verify, in a blockchain world, that my vote was recorded correctly.

[CarbonLifeForm]

So do we know if the idea is to scan the paper audit trail and place the scanned documents in a blockchain?

I suppose that might make tampering with the vote impossible, but if you're a voter, how do you verify now, and what happens to the paper ballots once they are scanned?

[David Pearce]

Sensible

Verifying the identity of a voter and that they only vote once, with no knowledege of the vote cast is about as far as you can go.

There is no such thing as anonymous and secure electronic voting

[iron]

It's a nice idea but like all blockchain projects I fail to see what benefit (other than hype) is provided by using blockchain rather than a boring database.

[Getmo]

I keep forgetting

that while blockchain is its own unique technology, the only problem it's solving is being a distributed database/ ledger with no one official authority to answer to, besides majority rule. It's suffering from buzzword status now.

I keep reading these articles about governments or orgs adopting blockchain and think "oh great idea" until I think about it a moment or somebody in comments point it out. The only reason blockchain was necessary is to keep a distributed database across many nodes synced, when it is also decentralized without a root authority by design. In most of these situations there is a root authority, and you want to centralize everything. And without a huge network of nodes to keep in sync, I don't know what to call it besides trying to apply peer2peer technology to a client/ server model.