A few issues:

1) How do you ensure that every citizen has only 1 single votecoin all the time (so no "buying votecoins" from others), can only vote for his/her local candidate while still being relatively anonymous? Most likely Votecoin would be an internal system used inside voting machines...

2) Bitcoin (and other blockchains) essentially work like a giant "clock" - once you know when a person roughly has voted, there are not that many possibilities - especially in smaller communities this can lead to issues.

3) Security of wallets: It is highly unlikely that in the voting cabin someone steals my ballot - computers however HAVE to be online to vote(!) and are usually infested with a lot of stuff that is not necessarily controllable from the outside.

4) Double spending attacks etc.! You have to have government certified + protected miners. Luckily, a single GPU can keep up a difficulty above 1, so the block generation rate is easily ensured. Security of the network is however dependent on a lot of trust - and especially in IT systems weaknesses can be very fast + easily exploited.

I like the idea, but wouldn't it be easy to sell one's vote. In Brewster's Millions, he pays people $5 each to vote for 'none of the above' in the upcoming election. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_film)

sounds good.

http://vote.coin.is/1Gy8cVUKykZqQ5MmCyKMCi7ExwY8NvgeLA

or better yet

http://vote.is/1Gy8cVUKykZqQ5MmCyKMCi7ExwY8NvgeLA


using this for national elections is one thing --- but going down to the example of an organization voting on executive members --- or inside universities where club members vote on how to spend the budget --- or --- i dont really know... a general purpose voting system based on cryptography is not an idea that should be easily tossed away...

I was thinking if you had a national ID like SSN, you could use that for one vote?

Other idea is a hardware key that you're given. It has value for one vote. Once you vote, the value is removed from the stick. Sort of like a credit stick that holds value within the device itself.

I've also thought about this.

Each voter visits the polling station and is given an address to vote wih. The voter enters the polling booth and applies their vote against their address. That vote goes into the blockchain.

It would be helpful for expat voters too. For example, in the UK, to register to vote as an expat, you have to have a paper application form posted to you that you then send back with your vote. This is impossible for expats without a PO box. An expat could register online and apply their vote. Using the blockchain, the voter could link their passport/national insurance number to their vote so that it's 1:1.

One definite downside would be the end of David Dimbeldey and election all nighters!

Anonymous votes would be impossible with blockchain as it is because the input of each transaction would be know to everyone.
Someone distributed the addresses, so someone would know the identity of all or some addresses.

Make sure that there are no people with multiple addresses or dead people still voting would not make things easier, too