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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Technology
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… you don't want to use a centralized database for votes exactly for the same reasons you don't want to use a blockchain for votes, unless you're doing some sort of zero-knowledge stuff in the background and what gets written to the DB doesn't allow the system operators to tell who exactly voted for who while still being able to tally the votes correctly. Even having a request increment a counter in the DB would mean it'd be possible to look at logs or traffic between the db, backend and frontend, and tell that when request X came in, candidate Y's counter was incremented. This is why most if not all electronic vote systems right now are completely fucked and a terrible security risk, there's way too many possible options for manipulating them. Centralizing the vote db wouldn't fix the problem, it'd just, well, centralize it.
Why would you want a zero-knowledge database? You want the exact opposite: you want to be able to tie the vote to a person, which is why ballots are associated strongly to your identity and why counting physical ballots remains so important.
The whole point with voting at least in a civic context is that your vote isn't tied to you, ie. nobody can actually tell who you voted for; they need to know that each vote is valid but not who cast each vote. You do need to have ID (or whatever the process is in your specific country) to be able to vote, but at least here the foldable piece of paper you actually put your candidate's number in has absolutely no identifying information on it, it just gets stamped by an election official when you go to put it in the ballot box.