“Him who votes have no power, him who counts the votes have all the power” JosephStalin
Few would agree more to the above quote than Al Gore and Hilary Clinton. The quote was first utteredby Joseph Stalin, inan attempt to mock the very idea of democracy. I agree 100% with thequote for the record!
I have an idea though, which would allow you to count the votes. My idea is based upon cryptographicallysigning votes, with a private PGP encryption key, which would make the process of verifying that the votes are correct, mathematically impossible to tamper with. In fact, even being able to change a single vote, would requireevery single computer on theplanet, running for a billion years!
Then, instead of creating a single machine to store the votes, we’d create the database, as a massively distributed system of web servers, where anyone could download the system, necessary to host the database, and install it on a 10 year old laptop if they wanted. Still with the same cryptographically secure system for every single vote in the database.
Such a system, would make it easy to implement “direct democracy” , without any risks oftampering with the votes in any ways, resulting in that we’d no longer need “representative democracy” , but could vote on every single task at hand, that had consequences for any group of people.This would allow only those who wereaffected by the question, tobe allowed to vote, for thequestions at hand. Allowing for tiny sub groups of democratic votes, on a case-to-case basis.
Basically, when youvote in such a system, you’d probably supply your social security number, in addition to an email address, a name, and your actual vote. After you have created such avote, with the specified data, you’d wrap your vote inside of a MIMEentity. Then this MIME entity would be cryptographically signed, with your private PGP cryptography key, and transmitted to some server endpoint, which would replicate your vote, to whatever servers it is in direct contact with itself. Basically, creating a massively scalable mirror, of every single vote within the system, with some sort of expiration date, at which the votes would be discarded anddeleted.
This would create a system impossible to DDOS, since there would be not one single endpoint, but possibly hundreds of thousands of endpoints, each mirroring possibly hundreds of other servers, in a massively scalable network mesh, of heterogenous servers, where you could easily setup your own mirror of the database yourselves. Andsince every single vote is cryptographically signed, anyone who wanted to, could easily verifyany vote they want to verify, using the public PGP cryptography key, from whoevercast the vote.
Combine this with the ideas of a “web of trust” , where people could use their private PGP cryptography keys, to verify theintegrity of other people’s public keys, you would end up with a voting system, that would make it literally mathematically impossible, to tamper with the votes, in any ways! Allowing people to cryptographically secured, vote on whatever questionsthey wanted to vote on, and such createworld wide direct democracy, with super tiny sub communities, basically deciding everything for themselves, on every single decision, that somehow has consequences for their own personal lives.
This web of trust, basically implies meeting a handful of people, have them show their IDs to you, with their names and social security numbers, for then to tell you the fingerprint of their public PGP cryptography key, which you could look up in e.g. the Ubuntu PGP key server , for then to sign their public key, with your private key. This way, you’d have a 100%perfect guarantee of that thesepeople actually are who they claim to be. Then later when you “count the votes” , you can easily use these people’s public PGP key, to empirically prove, beyond any doubt, that the vote actually originated from them, and was nottampered with in any ways. Since this web of trust also would happen to “rub off” unto who ever you have physically met yourselves, and those whom you forwhatever reasons chooses to trust Such a system would basically become super trustworthy, if every singlecryptographically secured voter, is able to at least meet 5 others, and sign their public cryptography keys.
Then you’d store the vote, after having verified its integrity, in a database, which could then be replicated, literally in hundreds of thousands of web servers, ranging from microsoft.com, to your little “kitchen bugger” , running literally your mom’s toaster, if you wished. And every single person with access to the database, could easily verify anyvote he wants to verify, in this database.
Then as the voteis closed, and all votes have been received, every vote for some specific case could becounted, wrapped in another MIME message as an aggregated result, and cryptographically signed, by anyone who would want to keep historical records of the votes, and the votes themselves could be deleted, to preserve space in this database.
An idea to implement this, and an argument as to why we should implement such a system, would be to create it, and create a democratic process, attempting to vote in Julian Assange as the President of the Earth. Since everybody seems to be opinionated about Mr. Assange, this would implyevery single citizen of the world, would highly likely be willing to spend the necessary time, to create a private and secure PGP key pair, to cast his or her vote in such amatter. Then hopefully, if for some reasons, Mr. Assange was to actually become our President, he’d hopefully gracefully accept the job, realising he could never actually interfere in our own democratic votes, andbasically simply become a “President only in the image” , and have no real power over deciding things. Kind of like the Monarchs of Europe has no “real power” today …
This would paradoxically, if we were able to actually vote him in, as the President of the Earth, actually grant him diplomatic immunity, and able to leave the embassy in freedom. Regardless of the results though, it would definitely make a lot of people run of and create a private PGP key pair, which they would probably be highly interested in keeping as secure as they possibly could. Which they then later could use to vote for anything else, they for whateverreasons want to vote for. And we would never need “government approval” for doing such a thing, since it would be 100% perfectly legal, and not in any ways be possible to stop! Basically, it would be a “passive democratic revolution, chemically cleansed of victims, and impossible to stop!” Arguing against this idea, is like arguing kittens are ugly! Our governments wouldn’t even dare interfere with it at all! And we’d have mathematically proven numbers, for every single question at hand, resulting in that we’d render our politicians obsolete, without making it possible for them to argue against us in any ways!
Basically, such a use case, trying to make Assange the President of the Earth, would create incentives for the entire Earth’s population, to start engaging in “direct democracy” , rendering representative democracy an obsolete thing, and frog leaping humanity forward, into the third millennium!
If you don’t understand the math/cryptography behind this, feel free to ask your local linux/PGP/security expert how this would work. Any software guy, with more than average knowledge about PGP and cryptography, could easily verify I am telling the truth!
It’s actually quite simple, and the math behind it, has been undisputed for as long as cryptography has existed. And even if we wouldn’t