Zero Knowledge Proofs as Voting Validation
A Framework for Governance and Personal Agency
as it could be
Imagine if every individual felt genuinely empowered to take actions that beneficially shape their lives and their communities lives. A structure where local voices and votes aren't just heard but are the driving force behind local governance. Today's centralized structures often overlook the unique needs of smaller communities, leading to a policymakers misrepresenting the people they are supposed to serve. What if we could return governance to the local level, empowering individuals at the correct level, in order to create more responsive and resilient social agreements.
Re-localizing Governance
Growing up, I always believed that change started at the top—that major shifts in society were the result of decisions made by distant leaders. However, as I experience more personal and professional challenges, it became clear that true change often begins at the individual level. Balancing personal freedom with family responsibilities and professional obligations highlighted the limitations of one-size-fits-all solutions. This realization sparked a desire to explore models of governance that prioritize local autonomy without sacrificing collective cohesion.
Orders of Magnitude Model for Scale
Enter the Orders of Magnitude framework—a decentralized structure for governance that scales from the individual up to global communities. At its core, this model is based on orders of magnitude: 1 (individual), 10 (family or small group), 100 (community), 1,000 (township), 10,000 (city), and so on. Each order operates with its own local constitution(with the option of being within a higher order constitution) tailored to the needs and values of its members, while respecting the autonomy of other orders. This approach ensures that decisions are made as locally as possible, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility.
Empowering Individuals and Communities
In this system, the individual is the fundamental unit of governance, possessing inherent rights and inherent responsibilities. Families and small groups form the second order, creating constitutions that reflect their shared values. As we scale up, communities and regions develop governance structures that address broader concerns while still grounded in local context. This decentralized approach not only promotes efficiency but also encourages innovation, as each order can experiment with policies best suited to its unique circumstances.
Looking Ahead
This framework isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for how we address today's most pressing challenges. By empowering individuals and local communities, we can foster more resilient and adaptable societies. Decentralized governance could pave the way for advancements in technology, energy, and social systems by removing bureaucratic obstacles and encouraging grassroots solutions. We will need a combination of stable and creative social architectures if we are to overcome today’s and tomorrows challenges.
Next week, we'll discuss “The Interstellar Seed of Life” a kind of philosophy which provides a naturally arising goal from which many other goals are derived and make meaningful pursuits. What is the purpose of life? Why do we get up in the morning? What is our role?
Continuing on to Voting Validation and Incentives for Citizen Verification
As promised from last weeks article:
This is not a functional website; it is an interface in progress.
I aspire to enable real functionality in time.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Authenticity
With upcoming elections only 2 weeks away, there’s more scrutiny than ever surrounding the accuracy and legitimacy of the voting process. A growing number of people are opting to vote by mail due to its convenience, but as we’ve seen, counting mail-in votes can take time, and this delay has led to concerns over the legitimacy and timeliness of election results. Let alone being verified by handwritten signatures in the age of ballot harvesting and AI.
With technology is rapidly evolving, one question remains: why can’t we verify votes faster and with more security? Enter Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP)—a cryptographic method capable of preserving privacy while ensuring that votes are counted accurately and swiftly, without disclosing personal voting information. This technology has been successfully used in the crypto world for anonymous transactions and can be applied to voting systems to bolster security, anonymity, and trust.
https://github.com/TheBojda/zkdemocracy?ref=hackernoon.com
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall07/cos433/lec15.pdf
https://info.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/student-handbook/files/project-library/cs4796/gf45-Final_Report.pdf
https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/jthaler/ProofsArgsAndZK.pdf
One Problem: Slow and Questionable Vote Counting
The current reliance on mail-in votes, while useful, have introduced significant delays and increased fraud in the counting process. When the public has to wait days or weeks for election results, it undermines confidence in the system. Citizens want the peace of mind that their vote is counted accurately and in a timely manner.
The challenge is ensuring that each vote is valid without compromising voter anonymity or exposing anyone’s vote data. Fortunately, zero-knowledge proofs provide an answer to this problem by allowing a system to verify the authenticity of each vote without revealing the identity of the voter or the details of their vote.
The Solution: Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) enable a prover (in this case, the voter) to demonstrate to a verifier (the voting system) that they cast a legitimate vote, without revealing who they voted for or other personal details. The key benefits of ZKP for voting are:
Anonymity: The voter’s choice remains private.
Security: The vote is securely validated and cannot be tampered with.
Speed: Once the polls close, all votes can be counted and verified almost instantaneously.
For instance, as detailed in zkDemocracy and other platforms(ar5iv)(Cryptology ePrint Archive), this technology has already been used to create anonymous voting systems that ensure privacy while maintaining transparency in vote counts.
Examples of ZKP Voting Systems
There have already been proofs of concept for ZKP-based voting systems, such as:
zkDemocracy: This system applies ZKP to voting, allowing users to vote anonymously while the results are stored and verified using blockchain technology(ar5iv).
Anonymous Voting on Ethereum: This project demonstrates how ZKP can be used on the Ethereum blockchain to build a secure, anonymous voting system(Cryptology ePrint Archive)(GitHub).
ZKP-Based Voting Systems on GitHub: There are numerous open-source projects on GitHub, such as ZKP-Voting-System, which enable developers to create decentralized and anonymous voting systems using ZKP(GitHub)(GitHub).
These systems demonstrate the potential of ZKP but remain complex for everyday voters or non-technical individuals to use. Ethereum has also become more fraught with scams, bubbles, and 3rd party security failures than have ever been seen before.
Making ZKP Accessible for Everyone
Although these projects are great starting points, they aren't particularly user-friendly for most voters. Many people lack experience with code, GitHub repositories, or crypto wallets. As a result, I have been asked to create a more user-friendly version of these systems that anyone can use to validate a vote securely and anonymously. (http://zkpvote.netlify.app)
How It Will Work:
Decentralized Hosting: By allowing anyone with a computer to host the voting software, we boost security through decentralization and cross-validation. No single entity will control the system, and votes will be validated across multiple nodes.
Incentivizing Node Operators: Users who run voting nodes are incentivized with the ability to validate new voters who are linked to them. As well as the ability to initiate a voting session, encouraging broader participation and ensuring that the system remains decentralized.
Secure Voter Validation: The real challenge isn’t counting the votes but validating voter identities. This will be addressed through a cross-validation approach, where node hosts validate new voters in their region, and their validations are further confirmed by other node hosts in the network. This provides multiple layers of cross validation that a voter is who they say they are. (if a node engages in fraudulent registration, all voters connected to them are known and can be removed from external voting rolls by external node operators)
This decentralized approach, combined with ZKP for anonymous validation, ensures that no single point of failure can compromise the system. Even if one node is compromised, the others will continue to validate votes properly. This structure enhances both security and trust in the election process.
Integrating The Orders of Magnitude
To address the issue of secure voter validation I am integrating The Orders of Magnitude. This structure facilitates the security and authenticity of voter validation by siloing responsibility across nodes. Here’s how it works:
Nodes: Each node in the system is responsible for registering new voters, with the validation done by both the node operator and by trusted individual peers. Nodes should also cross validate other nodes voters.
Cross-Validation: Other nodes in the network can remove untrusted voters from untrusted nodes from their vote scopes, ensuring that only voters they validate participate in their elections. (Small or Large)
Security Through Silos: If one node creates invalid users, other nodes can reject those invalid voters without disrupting the entire system.
This decentralized validation improves the odds that votes remain legitimate while also keeping the voting process anonymous and secure. The trustworthiness of the node by voters and other nodes keeps people honest.
Trust & Verify
In a world where the integrity of elections is under scrutiny, Zero-Knowledge Proofs offer a persistent solution. They allow for the creation of anonymous, secure, and fast voting systems that ensure every vote is counted without compromising the privacy of voters. By decentralizing the validation process and utilizing the principles of ZKP, we can create a future where elections are more transparent, trustworthy, and efficient.
As we move forward, the challenge lies in making these systems accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. But with the right approach, ZKP could become the foundation for a new era of secure digital voting.
I aspire to build the node software, it’s not going to be ready for election time, so you will have to accept this website façade which should approximate the interface I expect a similar version to be available in the first version. Check it out!