Ultimately,  it came to politics. Government's Ticket counting  is not trust worthy.

OR You go to each state and get them to adopt the standards individually.

Saw something related to e-voting and hashing just the other day out of Microsoft research that reminded me a bit of bitcoin:

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/microsoft-research-proposes-e-voting-attack-mitigation-103111

Seems like the idea is to use a blockchain like hashing mechanism where each vote contains a hash of the vote and the previous vote to prevent tampering.

What prevents me from voting with any x number of more satoshi's of my own?
You give me 1 satoshi to vote with, i vote with 100 satoshis on my desired option.

I think for a cryptographic voting system to be taken seriously, someone will first have to implement it and prove to the world that it works like it's supposed to for much smaller elections, like school boards and city council, and informal votes run by the media etc.

It is a tall bill to fill.  There are numerous requirements that the system must meet, such as being simple enough for everyone to understand how to vote regardless of demographic, and ensuring voters cannot prove to others how they voted (to prevent coercion).  For example, a scheme of scratch-off ballots has been proposed, where private keys associated with specific votes were revealed to the network.  If such were used, there would need to be a scheme to audit the integrity of the ballots (such as rolling two dice and randomly submitting one out of 36 ballots for complete cryptographic inspection).  And there would need to be a large community of people experienced with administering the system.

Look at an example of MIT blazing the trail: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/rivest-voting.html - this is the sort of place where such a thing needs to breed and be improved.

The technology underpinning the peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin would be a novel way to aggregate and tally and tamper-proof the votes without depending on a central tabulator... but would also present interesting challenges since people are motivated to exclude some "transactions"... (e.g. if you're a conservative miner, you're incentivized to not include votes for liberal candidates in your blocks, and/or to build on somewhere other than the end of the chain if it's to your advantage...)

Actually that is THE biggest problem.  Really the only non-trivial problem.

A POW doesn't prove the person doing it is suppose to be voting.  My company has millions of SSN.  So I could take them take the last 4 and vote as a million people.

Maintaining an accurate vote count, ensuring votes aren't tampered with, and allowing transparency once you solve the critical and difficult problem of ensuring only valid persons vote and they only vote once.  There is nothing in Bitcoin or block chains that help to solve that problem. 

I see your point, people can actually 'sell their votes' in a way where they sell their address and the buyer gets another vote.

Hmm, there has to be a good theory at least on how to do it, development can come after.
What if the current system of going to a polling station is used, and you still need to show ID to vote. After the ID is shown and your a registered vote an on the spot program generates a random (and I say that lightly) key which acts as your receipt.
You then go into the booth, vote using your receipt key.
Before you leave, the receipt key is checked if its in the system so you can't walk out with it and sell it. At the same time, when you go home you can see your vote in the blockchain.

Thoughts?

Exactly but once you solve the first problem of making sure only eligible voters vote, and only vote once, there is no need to have a block chain.  Using the block chain for the purpose of block chain is of no value.  Lets look at why Bitcoin has a block chain.  It is to prevent a double spend .... without a central trusted 3rd party.  Block chain isn't efficient it is simply a requirement if you want no central third party.

However in the case of voting as you indicated you STILL need a central trusted third party to do the meatspace verification. If they can be trusted to not cheat (or be cheated) doing that there is no reason to no trust them for the tallying.  The hashes of the entire voting record could be published publicly.  You could take your "result hash" from your vote and ensure it was recorded and added to your candidates totals.

Simply put the Bitcoin network isn't "perfect".  It is often more complicated, slower, and more prone to attack than other solutions it just happens to be the best solution if you want p2p transfers without need to trust a third party.

After re-reading my post, I got to the same conclusion.

I should respond to the email sender with this thread.