Blockchain Voting: Only If We Get It Right

The strongest good-faith objection, already gestured at in this issue's strategy layer: setting the bar at "proven prerequisite plus independently audited pilot" is high enough that it may never practically be met, which raises a fair question about whether this is a conditional "someday" position or a permanent rejection stated more diplomatically. A critic could reasonably ask this plank to specify what would count as clearing the bar. The bar is specific, not rhetorical: (1) PRIV-02's identity system deployed and operating at state scale for a non-voting government service, and (2) a blockchain-voting pilot that publishes its security audit results and survives independent review by the same caliber of researchers who found Voatz's flaws, without a comparable finding. Both conditions are concrete and checkable: this is a "someday, and here's exactly what someday looks like" position, not an unfalsifiable no dressed up as caution.

Overseas and military voters, and others who would benefit from more accessible remote voting technology, bear the cost of continued reliance on current, less convenient absentee methods while this issue's conditions remain unmet. Blockchain-voting technology developers bear a market-access cost from the stringent conditions. Election administrators in jurisdictions that might benefit from the technology bear the opportunity cost of continued caution, which this issue accepts as the price of not repeating Voatz's failure.