Pick the wrong ID Certification System and the Wrong Vote Tabulation System and well, there are consequences.
That being, the vote in your locale, be it municipal, state/provincial or federal, using current existing systems is likely not accurate, maybe even easily hacked. Certainly not Mobile enabled (unless you live in Switzerland for the latter.)
Say what? Yeah, get over it and start reading this post. ;)
What everyone wants these days is likely WEC Protected Votes:
ie - No Foreign Interference (a.k.a. the WEC/WHO/UN Triumvirate) in your Elections
Anyone can see there is 'Lots of news' in all forms of news outlets which point out to massive irregularities in the US tabulated vote for '20.
Warning: This is a long post, well, because the topic is so damned important that's why! ;)
Maybe the Swiss are the only ones laughing as they actually offered a bounty to see if the system itself could be hacked
The Great Schmozzle Correction: Grinding the US Vote Result Thru the State and Federal Supreme Courts
How it all shakes down there south of the 49th from my perspective, is largely an automatic function of the US State and Federal Supreme courts to decide the outcome of US vote certification in adherence with both State and Federal Supreme Court Constitutional Law adjudication governing state vote tabulation and certification of US Federal election results and, if those two items do not happen by December 14th, the 'State' declared result of the Electoral Vote Winner being made by the State level Attorney General, per the Incorporate or Commonwealth' State's own 'State level constitutional laws' governing vote tabulation for US Federal Elections, rules the day and, the cumulative 'declared electoral vote winner , at the state level, gets the "keys to the US White House" January 20th-21st, 2021, to become de facto leader of the free world.
Amid the current US vote chaos, regardless of where your allegiance is parked, looking forward,
there are some clear building block solutions out there in Cryptoland which are worth noting, most of which are fully 'open sourced' with great developer communities and, given the chance, can fix this type of voting shite from ever happening again, in any locale. (Blackbox crypto solutions, some of which are largely responsible for the current US schmozzle and, which are centrally controlled & permissioned for eVoting, are not part of this review)
So let's have a look at just one of these potential "eVoting Building Blocks" lurking around in Cryptoland: CARDANO
CARDANO is first and foremost these days 'waxing eloquent' about their delegated proof of state variant to decide the validity of data attached to their blockchain @ scale , not to be confused with the EOS dPoS variant, which is different. How different the two of them are, is a discussion for another post. (you can references an earlier TK post to do a high level 'diff' here)
I picked #CARDANO to review largely because their fearless leader, Charles Hoskinson has recently tweeted video to paraphrase " he may just roll up his sleeves and do something about the current state of voting" in the US, likely adding functionality to CARDANOs rapidly growing (and long delayed) set of capabilities, no becoming available to developers in the Open Source Community. All good, the more tech savvy types who can help lead their greater open source development communities into this rapidly emerging opportunity for crypto and DLTs the better, for everyone, investors, developers and voters/tax-rate payers alike.
Heady words from the 33 year old crypto giant. I hope there is some effort and thought behind the claim to back those words up.
Ok Charles, this is my challenge to you, to actually 'put your big boy pants on', start multi-tasking 'big time' and, as they say in Alberta, 'get er done'. ;)
CARDANO: TK's eVoter Building Block Review
First, CARDANO has good documentation and good road maps, with 'emerging' tools, reference implementations, production node software and code libraries which are both opensource and, have been tested on a number of parameters which are important to eVoting, one of them being TPS "Transaction per Second @ scale and the second; being the ability to support 'sharding' and joining of all private and or public 'sub' chains to the public chain using UTXO accounting methods which by the way, align with BTC Bitcoin use of UTXO. (CARDANO also gives good COVID Virtual Conferences.)
CARDANO also has a large active community of open source developers in various programming languages supporting concurrency (Go , Rust necssary for TPS @ Scale and fast predictable (guaranteed latency values & settlement times ) which you can view here and Hoskinson's directed IOHK core of commercial developer horsepower to drive the CARDANO opens source effort forward to be one of the TOP 10 "Market Valued" cryptocurrencies out there. As far as time stamping transactions goes, CARDANO at first glance looks solid...
When compared to BTC, that extended ecosystem of which CARDANO are 'partly' a part, by virtue of implementing the UTXO transaction handling methods, using today's last market check which says that CARDANO is US 3.1B compared to Bitcoin's US $296B market cap, CARDANO in hard investor reality terms is today is about (3.1/296) 1% of the total BTC Market Cap, which again, is today, about 63.9% of the total market cap of worldwide of all crypto, valued at US $463B.
In plain ole' investor terms in the fiat world then, CARDANO is a relative "small fry" but still, imo, a cryptocurrency investment with huge upside.
going a little bit further, that 'upside' will be realized by helping solve real markt challenges in various vertical segments, of which eVoting is extremely large.
Ok CARDANO are also now just (3.1/50) 6% the size of the immediate Ethereum camp using alternative double entry book keeping methods, where transactions must pay gas fees to secure the transaction approved via the ERC20 protocol, which in the latter case is used to power several 'clones' (Hard Forks) of Ethereum with 'market targeted' smart contract centric value add layers, part of the so called ERC20 ecosystem, currently (and always) yelping about the "Flippening", which supposedly see this 'collective' group 'own' more than 50% market share of the "Crypto Market Total Cap" at some time in the near future.
Ok let's dive a little deeper into CARDANO as it applies to possibly being transformed privately into a trusted eVoting Platform
CARDANO transformation into an eVoting capable blockchain centric dPoS eVoting set of Building Blocks:
First, lets define the CARDANO evoting challenge at a high level: In Plain Language,
Roll-up the Valid Votes Securely and Fast , Let the Public Know Results Fast & Often, Prove the VOTE is 100% secure
How to implement?
Think
'rolling up a number of voting results in State regions with n number of precincts reporting to a CADANO private Shard,
A Shard privately controlled by the 'Incorporated State' or 'State Commonwealth' entity connected to the main CARDANO private chain, which then via a gateway updates a summary view of results to the public CARDANO chain. Every vote secured online does the signature matching before allowing the vote to attach to the chain. Only the 'State' can see what is going on and decides what the public can see at any give time. with real, real time certified results (to get rid of press calling the election).
The 'State' would then have the option to pay the evoting systems implementing CARDANO building blocks , the developer, in CARDANO, for every transaction processed within a private deployment of nodes running on in-state paid for colo hosted and state secured hardware systems running the open source security certified Virtual Machine Manager operating the virtual machine and the container( maybe containers for multiple precincts in-state ) in which the CARDANO node operates. Paying in CARDANO could be achieved either with a direct buy of CARDANO on any cetrnsl on public exchange by the state, or perhaps BTC or even ETH could be used/converted into CARDANO with CARDANO supplied 'wrapper technology'.
Securing the voter credentials has multiple challenges when using CARDANO as I see it, none of them insurmountable, its just grind it out development and test work, which the state can pay for, using a local softwar developer resource in-state to keep the capaital flows in the familiy and employ a few more people under contract (meaning send the future eVoter Blockchain Protected Voting & Tabulation System work out to tender with a RFP/RFQ now so its ready for the mid terms 2022.): Her are a couple of requirements and test case metrics which need to be addressed to get CARDANO to work (not an exhaustive list, simply one that gets developers thinking and tech savvy investors measuring the effort required)
To see a pictorial representation of what that might look like on #IOTA read this , otherwise the
Requirement: "Should" be either of any of:
1. CARDANO implemented SECURE ID in Open Source
2. 3rd Party adapted existing SECURE ID in Open Source
3. 3rd Party adapted new CARDANO community developed SECURE ID in Open Source
4. 3rd Party adapted new Other vendor or Community developed SECURE ID in open Source
Narrowing the Requirement for Secure ID: "In-State", a good option...
In each one of the above Requirements for SECURE ID, we see the general premise that the 'state' has defined as a "should" level requirement, in other words they are open to options. It could be, the 'state' also says the development must take place "in-state" to boost employment , faciliate better oversight "face 2 face" and enable the spread of the effort through multiple "in-state" contractors to reduce the chance of collusion on price and also ensure time to market targets are reached via healthy competition.
Are CARDANO's Building blocks fit for purpose? Yes and, well no, at the moment. Here is why:
Right now, CARDANO coin holders delegated stakes are collectively administered by the pool operator for a share of rewards for performaing consensus cryptographic-ally, securely attaching transactions ( the bigger pools have a higher chance of winning a consensus spot and earning rewards versus a small solo node operator) which owns a share of the collective consensus on the current main chain, where the node operators are running the nodes, guessing the nonce to create the private key locking the data attached to the Cardano chain (or controlling the Smart Contract when that shows up, which might be operating the eVote) . The nodes works fast on CARDANO, producing consensus among nodes to validate the data before chain attachment per epoch (ie- did the voter registration signature match up or note, might be one chore of the distributed nodes of #CARDANO work on to reach a consensus that their results match to the prescribed % consensus demanded of the job during that 'consensus' epoch , the Nodes would hypothetically scan in the CARDANO blockchain entry posted image coming from the SecureID accredited evoter for the latter and former matched to a Ballot ID within the candidate transaction waiting for consensus approval from the nodes, do the 'diff' bwtween the nodes , then based on the collective 'consensus' results of the 'diff' comparison software running on each node (which needs to be open source to validate for security and can be 3rd party or community open source code) declare the match for the voter signatures "Yes" or "No", submit their vote to the quorum of nodes ready and able and trusted (from past work completed) and the quorum delegated PoS , that is the nodes the 'state' has approved to run the consensus operated by various colos around the 'state' .
IF "No" the vote is marked/attached on chain as "No",
that transaction state is initially mutable or "changeable", subject to a second "multi-signature" multi-sig sign off of the approved observers (from each registered party in the precinct) doing the physical check with people, including the vote tabulator worker the vote tabulation precinct manager etc.. which in most locales, make up the vote 'review' committee to either accept/reject/park vote for further review (paper or electronic), for which their first 'review' result 'set' of votes, is also directly, but this time immutably (can't be changed) attached to the initial mutable vote posted to the CARDANO Blockchain where the former 'transaction' state is changed from mutable to immutable (unchangeable, thereafter) saying this is a valid signature and we accept this vote,
where the dominant review 'sum' of "Yeses" or Nos" immediately triggers the next vote ' tranaction state' , either "YES or "NO" or possibly even "Parked" and,
in any case,
the other vote instance entries checked off by the voter (president, senator,congressperson, et al ) are then attached to the voter's immutable 'blockchain transaction' ballot as additional data belonging to that vote, immutably attached, as part of that vote to the CARDANO private precinct sharded 'blockchain', where the voter's preferences in each ballot 'check box' are attached immutably to the vote id on the Blockchain, cryptographic-ally protected by the voter private key for that vote (they can view that vote transaction state at anytime) and the private key of the eVoting system, so double private key protection each sharing the same public key address. Ideally if the review committee makes a determination different from what was originally intended by the actual voter, the voter can see that and conceivably the evoting system as designed should allow the voter to contest their collective reviewed position (more likely in the case of scanning in and tabulating a paper vote.)
n.b- Depending on the locale (state or municipality) it could be and is most likely, the voter mark must be only be "inside" the box or circle and clearly legible, so this means the developer of the system must include a piece of software code to enable further CARDANO node software review of an 'efemeral' (not permanent) and non transferable/relay-able" copy read from the private CARDANO shard by the participating CARDANO node running consensus approval/dis-approval software (approved previously by the 'state' )
CARDANO Community 'eVOTER CALL to ACTION'- OK Charles are you reading?
(Let's all remember, in the last episode of Supernatural, it didn't end well for 'Chuck', in this reality, eVoting is a far bigger, 'real', challenge :) )
Is CARDANO the right way forward to solve the eVoting Dilemma of 2020 by US Mid Terms 2022?
Quite Possibly, but, Lots of Effort, QA and Dollars will be required as well as timely Political Will to tender the project in the first place.
CARDANO, might quickly emerge as one of the choices for US states to solve the current voting challenge in time to be deployed for Mid Terms 2022, if key members of the CARDANO development community starts now, independent of whether or not ANY US state issues an RFP/RFQ and then issues a tender to solicit bids 'in state' in time to give the developers and testers a fighting chance to deliver a production ready crrpto blockchain protected eVoting System that will work, perfectly, every time.
There is a need, the need is urgent, as driven by voter demand, so why wait and, the addressable market is not just in the USA.
(Hell it turns out north of the US 49th, it's likely the GWN votes also got screwed, several times, buy this company & this guy)
Clearly there are lots of other things to think about , ie- the UI/UX layer into such a crypto blockchain protected eVoting system and several other components, none of which are technical hurdles, its simply grinding out the software development, integration and test work to get the work completed on time, with enough $ and resources paid for by yhe 'state' which frankly is you the tax payer/rate/payer.
As for the International Market for eVoting, some jurisdictions may not want or even allow the use of US developed solutions on CARDANO and, its why I will review IOTA in the same way on my next post for International use as an eVoting platform in the context of SOVRINTown's design.
Before I go- The Fork in the Road Choices we all have- Secure ID and Future eVotes
TK's VOTER SURVIVAL CHECKLIST
Let's examine a few of the 'unseemly' consequences, if you don't get your secure ID pick & Evoter use right:
1. Your Information is sold, over and over again with you receiving nothing in return for your data
2. Your data is used to track everything about you, your whereabouts for "Security Reasons"
3. You become eligible for "The Five Million Dollar VAXX"
4. Your Travel is restricted (IF you don't get the VAXX)
5. Your Job opportunities are limited (If you don't get the VAXX)
6. Your investment opportunities are limited (without the "right ID" & the VAXX)
7. You can't go to concerts/events or get an Uber/Lyft vehicle (without the "right ID" & the VAXX)
8. Your altered RNA changed your DNA and you into something that is not you (with the VAXX)
and on, and on, and on.
Welcome to the new normal? Definitely not, at the moment.
That said, our abject complacency will ensure all of the above come true, if we don't push back now.
'Unfixing' the Vote- Ensuring Fair, Transparent Voting, Some Ground Work...
So What to do?- Actively Resist and Privately Secure your Online ID & eVoting & Future Prosperity
A. Declare your Rights & Freedoms & Push back on your Local government Reps.
For Canadians Reading and Posting this link here is a start
Locally, Check your constitution, Your Bill or Charter of Rights, Freedoms.
Make sure the oppressors know you :
- Don't wear, reject the Facediaper, they dont work anyway, its a chainlink fence trying to hold out a sandstorm
- Get your smile back and re-engage daily with the people around you at work, play and in the shops.
- Are an organic soulful being, it's not the time to be an #NPC "Non-Player Character"
- Reject the VAXX, it's RNA altering, as no sane being wants to become a "Collateralized Chimera"
B. Embrace the Bankless, Peer 2 Peer Economy using Distributed DL Cryptocurency
- Shop with Distributed CryptoNode Network enabled & accepting Retailers and Service Providers
- BTC, ETH, DASH, Zcash, Monero use is on the increase
- IOTA for Machine 2 Machine feeless transactions
- Run a Website and accept Crypto for your Products and Services
- Shopify is a good place to start to add BTC
- Collect Crypto Rewards via your Browser and Lolly
C. Only use Blockchain Secured IDs with zero knowledge proof (or better) personal control of data, w/ widely distributed validation nodes
Here are a few for consideration:
- IOTA Secure ID
- ZCash with Zero Knowledge Proofs
- DASH with a variation of Zero Knowledge Proofs
- MONERO for Complete Privacy
D. Leverage the use of Silver and small value Gold Coins to do Business, Possibly Copper too.
- US Silver Dimes pre 1965 are worth approximately 1 US $
- Copper US$ and Canadian Pennies are worth $3 cents theses days
- Gold Coins can be bought in 1/10th of announce , worth US $200.00 these days
E. Encourage your Local Town or County Council to allow payment in Crypto
- They can setup and treasury and Hodl to protect local pension funds on the Blockchain
Multi-Sig Wallet is the answer here to control disbursements, using Dist. Crypto Secure IDs
F. Encourage your Local Town or County Council to support Referendums & EVotes on permissionless public DLTs
- Two steps beyond SurveyMonkey , DLT for eVoting and referendums are public and the records immutable
- the first step towards government transparency at any level
G. Start using Permission Advertising Services Like BRAVE Browser to earn Crypto for your Views
- You decide what you see and what you tip to other publishers
H. Demand Complete Government Transparency and Evoting Adherence for all activities
-Referendums, registered lobbyists, Evoting, EGovernance Budget and Tender Management
- Public Sector Wages by Job role
- Public Pension Fund Activity
I. - Ensure your Constitution, Chart of Rights & Freedoms, Laws Status is updated publicly on a public DLT
-for Honest Government which is efficiently managing their afairs with your tax dollars
That's all I have for now... ;)
Hopefully the #CARDANO community responds with more than a chorus of crickets.. :)
TK over and Out.
*****
