> Can you explain which problems you believe this solves, in detail? It's categorically untrue to say that it can be validated from a single point and I think that's the key gap in these solutions: voting involves people and that happens outside of what a software system can see. You can deploy a VC's dream of ineffective technologies and you'd have made no progress on the core question of whether the votes you tallied were cast by legitimate voters and recorded as they intended.

I mean a system in which each eligible citizen receives a cryptographic token. They use that cryptographic token to vote. At the end of the tallying process, the government publishes a cryptographic object, that allows every individual to compare their token to it and validate that the vote of their token was counted, and counted correctly.

This can be accomplished without facilitating vote buying by displaying a message to the voter at the time they input their vote, inside the voting booth. Without that message, you can validate that your vote was counted, but not who it was counted for. With that message, again visible only in the booth, you may validate who it was counted towards.

This does not mitigate the problem of validating eligibility. It does mitigate the problem of accurate counting of votes cast.

> This adds new problems: if this uniquely identifies the person and their vote, your boss, union, pastor, etc. can demand that you show them you voted the way they wanted to. If it doesn't, you have the problem that it's very hard to disprove claims that a vote wasn't recorded correctly by the system or that someone ineligible was allowed to vote. Doing it cryptographically means that your system is now far more brittle and people have to trust a complex software stack which statistically nobody can audit as opposed to simple, robust paper ballots which can be understood by grade school children.

Right, you need a blinding solution such that the information required to prove direction of vote is visible only in a secret, ephemeral context (e.g. voting booth). There are complete proposals with this feature, I believe.

> How does a blockchain change this? Texans are still going to claim that people in California shouldn't have been allowed to vote for the other party — they'll change the lies they're telling from saying that people are sneaking in bags of ballots to, say, claiming that the voting machines changed votes after recording them, people who weren't supposed to be eligible were allowed to vote, etc. A blockchain won't solve any of the complaints we saw about, for example, dead people voting — that takes local authorities on the ground, all over.

The blockchain piece isn't particularly important. I think merkle-tree like cryptographic objects can be useful in validating systems like this efficiently, but they are not necessarily an essential feature.

You're right that Texans may still claim that ineligible Californians voted. A cryptographic system does not address the problem of validating eligibility, that is outside its scope. It addresses the problem of accurate, verifiable tallying. So that there are no viable stories of ballots being thrown out or otherwise miscounted.