Decided to delay the launch of the kickstarter project due to lack of technical, legal, and UX peer reviews. There is a lot of risk in the voting and election domain, particularly with new and disruptive solutions. And VOTES definitely fits into that category. VOTES is both a fundamental shift in how electronic scans of ballots are currently handled as well as how some of the current next generation digital voting solutions are being designed.
For example, with VOTES there is no encryption of the ballot contents while at rest. Tech background – digital data can be described as being encrypted while at rest or while in motion, in transit. Given the internet, most everything is encrypted in transit and so will be VOTES. Quite heavily so. But with VOTES, both the software and the digital ballot contents are not encrypted at rest but instead are protected by a Merkle Tree solution, which is basically the same principle underlying cryptocurrencies but without the private keys. As a Merkle Tree secures the history of the cryptocurrency transactions, a Merkle Tree solution is applied to all the software changes and ballot contents that are added to the ballot ledger. If you are a software developer, think git.
With VOTES, both the ballots and all the relevant software that handles the ballots and tallies is open source and stored in the same ledger (repositories). But that is not all – if it was, it would not be a viable election solution. VOTES is much more then just a Merkle Tree solution. For example, the paper ballots are cryptographically connected to the digital scans, and each voter is given a partial anonymous hardcopy of that data. This is different. This is disruptive. And it is transparent.
And if you can peer review it, that would be awesome. Thanks so much.