Voting For The 21st Century

And so as a proud Edinburgh, Scottish, UK and EU citizen, I voted last week. It is one of the most fundamental things that we have in our world .. the right to vote.

But I watched the count, and saw a mainly 19th Century system of voting — I do appreciate some of the reasons why it is done like this, but really we need to look at the core infrastructure for making parts of it digital and to integrate trust at every point.

And so I took my piece of paper — which came in the post — to the election station. I handed it over, and they looked up my name on a piece of paper, and then someone looked up another piece of paper and wrote my ID onto the voting card. I then went into a voting booth, and put a cross on the paper with a pencil (!!!), and folded it up. Then it went off in a van, and lots of people counted the votes.

So let’s have a bit of fun, and see if we can find a solution to creating a more citizen-focused election system, and where our voters can register themselves digitally, and then for each voter to cast their vote, and then for every voters to see the total of the votes cast, while not revealing any of the votes for each person.