What I’m describing isn’t transparency of individual votes, but of systems: a public, auditable record that proves votes were counted correctly without exposing identities.
The goal isn’t to replace systems like Germany’s, but to extend trust where it’s currently broken. Places where citizens can’t volunteer, ballots disappear, or results are unverifiable. It’s not about seeing into votes; it’s about ensuring no one can alter them unseen.
Places where citizens can’t volunteer, ballots disappear, or results are unverifiable.
But NFTs are not going to improve trust in these systems. I don’t know exactly how you picture NFT implementation in election systems, but how I see it the feature that would help like this is the reason it cannot work: the traceability. If you want to ensure that each vote is only used once and counted all the way to the end, you need to link it to indiciduals.
Also, there are easier ways to raise trust in elections. Allow foreign oversight. Allow the populace to volunteer and count etc.
Fair points, and I agree that transparency without privacy is surveillance, not democracy. The version I’m describing wouldn’t track who voted but would use zero-knowledge proofs or one-time identity tokens to confirm that each verified citizen voted once without revealing which vote is theirs. It’s about verifiable integrity rather than traceability.
You’re also right that civic oversight and volunteer counting are the gold standard. That’s how it should work. The technology becomes relevant only where that level of trust or participation isn’t possible. In healthy democracies, NFTs wouldn’t replace human oversight; they’d simply add another layer of cryptographic assurance that no one upstream can quietly change the math.
Who would implement those systems? The same people who do not implement civil oversight and volunteer election work. Why would the same people who block the implementation of the “gold standard” implement your system and why would you trust them with not tampering an electronic system?
They wouldn’t have to. The idea is that such a system wouldn’t rely on any single government to implement or control it. The protocol itself would be public, open source, and globally auditable. Anyone could verify the math, not just the people in power. If an administration tried to tamper with it, that manipulation would be visible to everyone, instantly. The goal isn’t to give them another tool to manage; it’s to make tampering technically impossible rather than politically discouraged.
True, someone would have to say that. The difference is that the system could be built and proven independently before any government adopted it. It would not depend on authority to exist, only to recognize what already works.
Wrong. Every elective system needs an authority. That does not mean an authority as in authoritative, but in the sense of an organisation that hosts it.
How would you test an elective system without a government that holds elections with your system?
Why would that someone that says “This is how we do this!” not say “We do it the ‘gold standard’ way now!”?
Another thought: from what I gathered from your explanations, you’d want to implement a system very similar to the german elective process but digitalised with Blockchain and NFTs. That’s not revolutionary, it’s just on the same wavelenght crypto bros are surfing for years.
NFT has no practical use in this area. Leave it be.
Every system needs an authority to organize it, yes, but authority and verification do not have to be the same thing. A government could still run elections while the verification layer remains public and mathematically provable. Testing could happen in smaller civic or international contexts before official adoption.
You’re right that digitalizing a working system isn’t revolutionary by itself, but the point isn’t hype or “crypto bro” novelty. The goal is a trust model that doesn’t collapse when the authority running it does. It’s about resilience, not replacement.
What I’m describing isn’t transparency of individual votes, but of systems: a public, auditable record that proves votes were counted correctly without exposing identities.
The goal isn’t to replace systems like Germany’s, but to extend trust where it’s currently broken. Places where citizens can’t volunteer, ballots disappear, or results are unverifiable. It’s not about seeing into votes; it’s about ensuring no one can alter them unseen.
But NFTs are not going to improve trust in these systems. I don’t know exactly how you picture NFT implementation in election systems, but how I see it the feature that would help like this is the reason it cannot work: the traceability. If you want to ensure that each vote is only used once and counted all the way to the end, you need to link it to indiciduals.
Also, there are easier ways to raise trust in elections. Allow foreign oversight. Allow the populace to volunteer and count etc.
Fair points, and I agree that transparency without privacy is surveillance, not democracy. The version I’m describing wouldn’t track who voted but would use zero-knowledge proofs or one-time identity tokens to confirm that each verified citizen voted once without revealing which vote is theirs. It’s about verifiable integrity rather than traceability.
You’re also right that civic oversight and volunteer counting are the gold standard. That’s how it should work. The technology becomes relevant only where that level of trust or participation isn’t possible. In healthy democracies, NFTs wouldn’t replace human oversight; they’d simply add another layer of cryptographic assurance that no one upstream can quietly change the math.
Who would implement those systems? The same people who do not implement civil oversight and volunteer election work. Why would the same people who block the implementation of the “gold standard” implement your system and why would you trust them with not tampering an electronic system?
They wouldn’t have to. The idea is that such a system wouldn’t rely on any single government to implement or control it. The protocol itself would be public, open source, and globally auditable. Anyone could verify the math, not just the people in power. If an administration tried to tamper with it, that manipulation would be visible to everyone, instantly. The goal isn’t to give them another tool to manage; it’s to make tampering technically impossible rather than politically discouraged.
Someone would need to say: “This is how we vote now”, and someone would have to organise elections around this new method.
True, someone would have to say that. The difference is that the system could be built and proven independently before any government adopted it. It would not depend on authority to exist, only to recognize what already works.
Wrong. Every elective system needs an authority. That does not mean an authority as in authoritative, but in the sense of an organisation that hosts it.
How would you test an elective system without a government that holds elections with your system?
Why would that someone that says “This is how we do this!” not say “We do it the ‘gold standard’ way now!”?
Another thought: from what I gathered from your explanations, you’d want to implement a system very similar to the german elective process but digitalised with Blockchain and NFTs. That’s not revolutionary, it’s just on the same wavelenght crypto bros are surfing for years.
NFT has no practical use in this area. Leave it be.
Every system needs an authority to organize it, yes, but authority and verification do not have to be the same thing. A government could still run elections while the verification layer remains public and mathematically provable. Testing could happen in smaller civic or international contexts before official adoption.
You’re right that digitalizing a working system isn’t revolutionary by itself, but the point isn’t hype or “crypto bro” novelty. The goal is a trust model that doesn’t collapse when the authority running it does. It’s about resilience, not replacement.