Decentralized democracy - Citizen Initiative Voting

submitted by [deleted] from (self.DecentralizeAllThings)

This is something that can be implemented EVERYWHERE. You basically build a website where citizens of a municipality, county, region, state, province, country or continent can vote on things and then actually know how large a part of the population agrees with them. One of the major problems that the democratic process faces is of course the corruption of the elected officials and deep state: they don't care what the citizens want, they only care about what will pay them best.

With a system where residents can register and be authentified - but not IDENTIFIED - people can vote anonymously on any number of issues. Some might say "but it's not a real vote, because the government isn't organizing it". Well that's just the thing: the true power is the citizenry. When 70% of the population wants something to be done and the government decides against it, you have to ask yourself, WHY ARE THEY ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH THAT?

And the reason is simple: Even though 70% of the population wants that change, these 70% probably don't know that 70% want it. Because the government doesn't want them to know. But using this decentralized democracy system, the people would be able to know exactly where they stand on issues, and when the time comes to demand that their will be done, the government better do as they are told - OR ELSE.

Which government rests easy when they see 70% or hell even just 14% of the population marching down on their government buildings, intent on GETTING THEIR DUE no matter what? None, I would think.

I think the technology is there. Votes could even easily be blockchained and shared between all adherents of the system, in an unalterable, un-falsifiable record of the people's positions. In such a case, authentification without identification is important, as it allows people to vote anonymously AND legitimately and securely.

This thing needs to be built. Yesterday if possible.

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Dude, fucking great idea! I'm sharing this post, if you don't mind. Edit: you've put into words something that has been resting in my mind for some time. The people could definitely do something like this, but all that manufactured consent really gets in the way.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Of course, share away. And thanks.

[–]now 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Sound great. But how to do it anonymous? Maybe it doesn't need to be anonymous. I think any start is a great start..

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't have the technical know-how of the whole anonymous authentication thing. Other people have it, they've explained it to me before, and I'll try to repeat the parts I remember:

First you need to register in a database. This part is not anonymous. You get registered, and with that registration, you get a key that is yours and yours only. This key is valid for voting. Now you might say, well maybe registering on this database puts me on a government list that I don't want to be on, because government surveillance. Fine. So maybe the telephone, address, and postal code databases are scanned and associated with keys that are made on the spot, so a whole lot of people ARE ALREADY IN THE DATABASE straight from publicly available information. Then your presence on the database doesn't even mean you registered, much less voted. Even the most surveillance-aware citizens should be satisfied with such measures. So there is a database of pseudo-id's of people that may or may not have directly registered, and no way to trace if they ever voted on anything.

Then you have the voting system. You do NOT send your key when you vote. Rather, the voting system sends a "challenge" which is an encrypted "lock" that your key can unlock. You send back the unlock code, which AUTHENTIFIES you, without IDENTIFYING you, since the lock is made to be unlocked by all valid keys, and give a different but valid unlock code for each. In such a system, a near-infinite number of locks and keys can exist. All the voting system can know is that the vote is valid. And if you try again? Well, the system will see the second identical unlock code and say nope, you already voted.

Something like that. The wonders of encryption. And some algorithms already exist that are resistant to both supercomputers AND quantum computers, which is a weakness of standard cryptography. But suffice it to say that such a system can be made secure against future technologies for many decades, because well... After a quantum computer, what's stronger, you know? Nobody's even imagined any kind of advancement beyond quantum computers, AFAIK. Theoretical scientists are nowadays starting to look for that next frontier, so needless to say, there aren't even theories of anything beyond.

So this system is 100% feasible with current technology. Then you could blockchain all votes, that is, have a distributed ledger of all votes (votes are counted without any identifying information, so this is safe) ever, distributed between all voluntary participants. Say you have a million people storing the blockchain of votes. If somebody tries to alter it, there are 999,999 other copies that all say "nope, your copy is corrupted", so nobody can ever falsify such records, which can be made publicly available for auditing by the general public. No secrets, full transparency.

The ONLY reason we don't have this alrady is CITIZEN LAZINESS. The governments will certainly never build anything like this. WHY ON EARTH WOULD THEY? Pull the rug from under their own feet? You know? But the citizens can do it. Fuck the governments. THE PEOPLE ARE THE POWER.

LET THE PEOPLE SPEAK AND KNOW WHAT THEY SAY. Then nothing can stand in their way.