Purpose of an Alternative Voting System

Elections are an important fabric of modern society. They are responsible for choosing leadership of school boards that set the direction for our communities, executives that set the direction for publicly traded companies, and politicians that set the direction of our nation. An equitable society hinges on the ability to conduct safe, transparent, and anonymous elections. These issues have always raised concern since the dawn of organized civilization. Recently, concerns have arisen that the security of US elections may have been compromised and that governments in some countries may be repressing the true results of elections. Honestvote eliminates many of these worries. See more info here.

How Does DAT Make Voting Safer?

Our unique infrastructure is what makes our system truly revolutionary. DAT is an acronym coined by Honestvote that stands for a voting system that is Decentralized, Anonymous, and Transparent. These are the primary properties of Honestvote which make it the voting system of choice for all Honest Elections.

Decentralization

In our system, recording votes is not trusted to a single centralized authority, but instead numerous trusted authorities across many elections that require validation of each other’s records in order to maintain integrity. Under our system, it becomes technically infallible for one party to manipulate the vote count and even if they attempted to do so, they would quickly be exposed by other parties, revoking their privileges as a trusted party, and severely damaging their reputation. For example, if two counties, County A and County B were trusted parties and conducted their own elections, County A would validate the election of County B and vise versa. If County A attempted to forge votes, manipulating the vote count, County B would quickly recognize. In response, County A’s administration privileges would immediately be revoked removing their ability to conduct elections on our system. Such an event would be extremely public and forever damage the trust of County A. This severe penalty makes certain that bad actors are removed from our system and insures to voters that their votes are being recorded correctly.

Anonymity

Modern encryption techniques relying on established methods of security including public/private key cryptography based on elliptical curves and SSL insure that voters on Honestvote are anonymous about their election choices. In a future release, we have plans to implement ring signatures in order to increase anonymity.

Transparency

From a user’s perspective, anyone is able to trace back their vote to its true origin and see realtime results of the election. Such a system is infeasible within traditional systems based on the way they are architecturally designed.

Roles in the System

There are several different roles that nodes on the Honestvote network have. There are Good Citizens, Administrators, and Voters They are described below.

Good Citizens (Full Nodes)

Anyone on the world wide web can audit elections held on the Honestvote network by becoming a Good Citizen. They can do soby simply cloning the official Honestvote https://github.com/jneubaum/honestvote ‑ Connect your account to preview links and following the Get Started instructions which describe how to connect to the Honestvote mainnet.

Full nodes have all of the functionality that administrator nodes have except that they are not trusted authorities and therefore have no say in consensus and cannot declare elections on the mainnet. This means that full nodeshave the ability to validate all past and current elections.

Administrators (Consensus Nodes)

Administrators have the reserved right to hold elections on Honestvote. They also have the ability to perform consensus, or agree on the correct version of election history. A full node (aka Good Citizen) is able to become a consensus node (aka Administrator) by undergoing a rigorous screening process, paying a onetime network fee, and being approved by the network of trusted parties.

Voters (Mobile and Web Client)

Voters are able to register and vote from the convenience of their laptop, tablet, or phone.

Registry Service

The registry service is the single centralized point of Honestvote that new nodes must communicate with in order to discover Honestvote mainnet, or its primary network that elections take place. The official registry service is maintained by the Honestvote team of developers.