Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, breaks down how you can approach voting using a blockchain. His analysis is detailed and shows how a solution could be constructed.

He illustrates the part of the problem that the blockchain is very good at solving.

Blockchains provide two key properties: correct execution and censorship resistance. Correct execution just means that the blockchain accepts inputs ("transactions") from users, correctly processes them according to some pre-defined rules, and returns the correct output (or adjusts the blockchain's "state" in the correct way). Censorship resistance is also simple to understand: any user that wants to send a transaction, and is willing to pay a high enough fee, can send the transaction and expect to see it quickly included on-chain.

But there is a big gap for two things that are critical, and he suggests, often overlooked.

Both of these properties are very important for voting: you want the output of the vote to actually be the result of counting up the number of votes for each candidate and selecting the candidate with the most votes, and you definitely want anyone who is eligible to vote to be able to vote, even if some powerful actor is trying to block them. But voting also requires some crucial properties that blockchains do not provide:

• Privacy: you should not be able to tell which candidate some specific voted for, or even if they voted at all
• Coercion resistance: you should not be able to prove to someone else how you voted, even if you want to

Great read to understand how this could be done.