Voter Registration and æternity

Aside from running my own business, I work as a Quality Control Coordinator with a company that gets people to register to vote. There are a lot of steps involved between receiving a voter registration card(which is considered a federal document and cannot be altered) and actually sending the VR card to the court clerk. These steps arise mainly because the company has to record the data they recieve in order to get funding. There are a lot of places in the process where errors can occur but basically the company can only pull information from the VR cards that would be considered publicly available. In what way could æternity help with this process? @aeternity-team

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Hey @Mike,

Thank you for this question, our developers will get back to you.

Regards,
The AE Team

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Hey! I’m not a developer. But I would consider

  • AE as tool of transparency. In SCM, the whole process of events, need a trusted party between government, voters, politica parties, and even delivering services who’d likely blame each other.
  • Traceability is the process; but customer (“voter”) experience is the goal. Will you receive applauses by all parties involved? Would you at least receive less criticism?
  • Blockchain could be the solution. But equally as important, the UI/UX design for “public auditors” as journalists, HR NGO, and International Organisms verifying the votes.

They will not care/understand the back-end protocol or technology; but they will understand its “immutability” value if correct design is made. That’s your main responsibility. Only suggestions man, don’t hold me accountable! Best of lucks, lmk how it went brother.

Julio

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Thanks Julio. I hadn’t considered how the political parties would take it on, I just figured the transparency would make it a trustworthy option.

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Also, uploading your identity and habits (and voting process) into an immutable ledger, doesn’t sound like a good idea. Best wishes though!

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Hey! Appreciate the interesting question. I am not 100% sure that I understand you, but maybe I can provide more clarity to how voting will work in æternity (at least in the beginning):

  1. Since we are a public blockchain and we are trying to be as trustless and decentralized as possible (at this stage of tech development), there will be no requirement for users to provide personally identifiable information in order to participate in voting. In blockchains, and actually in the “capitalist” world, people can vote with value. There is a big difference between political voting and the market (voting with your money). I would say that the biggest difference here is that the market provides you with a tangible result from your vote more quickly. It is also simpler, having in mind the process that you descried above and just paying for something (or not paying). Paying for something also usually does not involve providing personal information (depending on the purchase amount, type of purchase, seller, etc, etc.)

  2. At æternity anyone who has AE tokens will be able to simply sign a message (no transaction is executed, no AE transferred) with the private key that holds their tokens OR the provate key of an address that has been delegated with AE tokens. The latter is actually very interesting for a couple reasons. First, it allows users to send their voting rights to any other user (let’s say a better expert in the field). Second, it allows the user to send their voting right to another address they control (so they don’t have to sign with the private key that secures their AEs); 3. Could make it harder to identify the actual voter (address that holds the AE), depending on how this is implemented.

  3. Another peculiarity of æternity’s governance mechanism is the fact that the voting result is not binding on the protocol level (for now). The result of the vote is definitely more significant than any off-chain discussions that happen in chats. forums, and social media where people who don’t own AE can provide opinions. Governance in æternity is a form of on-chain voting, which we believe could prove to be more productive than anything off-chain. The main reason for that is:

  4. Users are able to “put their AE where their mouth is”. Any important decision that is reached through on-chain voting on æternity (and is later implemented) could directly affect AE users by increasing or decreasing the value of the æternity ecosystem. In this case a rational behavior for any user would be to vote in a way that maximizes the wellbeing of all AE users.

  5. With all that said, game theory will play a big role for the future of æternity’s governance mechanism. It could turn out that users are not interested in providing their votes on subjects. Or it could turn out that the system is too abused to be relevant. This remains to be seen. Nontheless, voting in æternity is a form of on-chain, liquid democracy, an idea that is only now begging to be tested on a global scale. It is a super interesting (at least for me) experiment and I am looking forward to its implementation. Of course, there will also be an æpp that it will make it much easier for users to vote.

A bit long, but I hope it provided interesting insights.

Kind regards,
Vlad

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