Governance

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ballots

About the vote

Another vital requirement of self governance is holding general elections without logistical costs. With this ability a population of any size can hold numerous elections in a short period of time. Using the concept of a public ledger, something already in use, and everyday devices we have achieved this requirement.  If we use this to decide a clear path of governance then an agenda can be written. 

real world solutions

Public Ledger

The idea is to use a simple public ledger to tally election results and a validation step to qualify those results. When you cast your ballot towards a choice you get back a secret code that appears on a public ledger with your vote. This means everyone can see your vote but nobody knows it was you who voted. Only you know that spot on the ledger it correct.  You announce publicly that the ledger everyone has, does show one correctly recorded vote. Once eighty-five percent of the voters validate the ledger, a two-thirds majority result can be declared as majority ruled. What that means is, eighty-five percent of two-thirds is at lest fifty percent majority. For example, one hundred people call a vote… A, B or C. Lets say sixty-six people vote for B, B gets sixty-six votes shown on the ledger from anonymous voters. When eighty-five voters validate the ledger as true, only fifteen ledger records can be called into question. If you consider every questionable record, all fifteen, is for the winner, and remove those votes, you are left with fifty-one votes for B which is a majority. There is another way of explaining and implementing these elections.

At this point most people should have a basic understanding of Bitcoin. We know that you get a wallet and in that wallet you put your coins. You can then put those coins into other people’s wallets as you see fit. The coin and the wallet are just numbers. Only people you tell your wallet number too will know that is your wallet. It’s private. Everyone knows how many coins are in each wallet because every time a coin changes wallets it is recorded in a public transaction ledger that some nerd called blockchain. Only the wallet numbers and coin are recorded.
With that understanding we can think of a online election as having the same public ledger. Everyone gets a wallet and each ballot choice will also get a wallet. Eligible voters will receive one coin to cast into the wallet of their ballot choice.The wallet with the most coins wins. Mint a new coin and ledger for each election. This allows for large scale secure digital elections that we can do from our phones or other devices.
 
The method seems to be a simple way to automate anonymous polling for a population. We can quickly hold elections with limitless numbers of voters with a minor cost. This method creates an opportunity to have votes contested but the people can still safely carry out elections. Contested votes should be expected as people will not validate for many reasons; while other people will want to change their vote or maybe a voter is truly compromised but as long as a true majority can be found then the process must continue. Another key factor in secure elections is a strong community discussion. These conversations will tend to indicate a clear majority agreement and predict election results.
 
When you leave the current voting system in place, without any changes, it works like a safety net for problems online. Regardless of what happens, we always end up with what we have now, elected representatives, strangers a who say they are the best choice. This is about running online elections, on top of the current voting system in the background. Without the risk of losing what we have now, we gain the ability of conducting online elections.