We're excited to share what we've been working on - the TrueVote app in action!
TrueVote is not just an app; it's a commitment to transparency. Built on Bitcoin, Opentimestamps, and Nostr, our open-source platform ensures tamper-proof ballot data. No smoke and mirrors, just verifiable election integrity of every ballot, every vote.
TrueVote solves two fundamental problems in elections:
1. Ballot verification: With TrueVote, you can verify your vote was counted, eliminating the uncertainty that plagues traditional voting methods.
2. Convenience: TrueVote brings voting to your fingertips, eliminating the inconvenience of polling places and mail-in ballots. Voting should be as convenient as the rest of our digital lives.
We believe in openness, which is why our tech stack is entirely open-source. Transparency isn't just a feature; it's a virtue. We're empowering voters with unprecedented visibility into the voting process.
Ballot data is validated using Opentimestamps hashing on Bitcoin. No "token" needed. No "new crypto coin" needed. Bitcoin and Bitcoin only.
And now, TrueVote uses Nostr, an innovative decentralized and open-source communications protocol, for secure authentication.
Technology (bitcoin) has made it possible to separate money and state, and it is time to decouple the state from the election process to ensure election integrity.
It's time we vote on our phones!
#TrueVote #ElectionIntegrity #ElectionTransparency
Replies (51)
Next 6 months of dev on top of Nostr will be insane, I'm now at
@PABLOF7z bullish level.
I want to look into this, this is pretty exciting.
Homomorphic system ? Such that one can verify the votes without revealing the actual vote ?
Cheers
Interesting.
How do you verify a vote is associated with a real human with real citizenship?
Very cool! How are you defining identity? i.e making sure that one user can only vote once?
Very bullshit. 😂
What about the anonymity of the vote? Pseudonyms of Bitcoin alone are not enough.
if an election happens in the woods but there are no phones, did an election happen?
Nice. How are all the votes committed? Do you guys run an aggregation server and then commit votes in big blocks?
How do you anonymize the ballot? How do you decouple the voter id from the vote?
Best thing I’ve seen in the last few months... Congratulations!
Nice Brett, good idea 🤙
The cost to create new keys is free, therefor, the cost to vote multiple times is free.
You need to prove human uniqueness, which implies incorporating the dreaded #DigitalIdentity in some manner.
My take? Spending #Bitcoin is the best vote on earth.
I don't have a phone so
Until you can identify the authority that will separate elections from the state, I will continue to believe that what you call the two fundamental problems with elections are not bugs from the prospective of those running the elections.
And your positive The problem is The way we vote and not the concept of democracy itself?
Good morning Brett. This is incredible man great work.
Is there a place to find info on this for people who don't use nostr? I'd like to share this with a few people.
Thank you!
Democracy is ineed flawed: What do 2 wolves and 1 chicken vote on when they decide what to eat for dinner?
But, as long as we have it, we may as well have election integrity.
A functioning democracy is one where everyone eligible to vote does vote, and every vote is counted perfectly. We don't have that now, so we're building it at TrueVote.
Critics who don't want to have transparent, accurate elections have no defensible position.
Yes, those are the challenges. The voting registrar authorities (in the United States, typically the States and Counties) are still responsible for voter registration. We will work with each registrar and the DMV and link the Nostr key to their voter registration.
There is a browser interface.
The key is linked to your voter registration.
Your Nostr key is tied to your voting registration record. The ballot is decoupled from the public key, so no one can see a voters' ballot selections.
Thanks Rubu. We need it!
How does that prevent voting multiple times?
The ballotid and userid is encrypted using the voters' private key. Only the voter can view the ballot and prove the ballot belongs to their user account.
There are heuristic searches that may need to be defended against with additional anonymizing of data.
Yes, both time and number of records will trigger an Opentimestamps submission, depending on velocity of data.
Love that. Yes, yes it did, but we'll never know if it was fair.
For sure. Voters still need to register and those registrations are linked to TrueVote.
Just like today with mail-in ballots, you can't have more than one. You still need to have a valid voter registration record.
Voting registrars still have to validate a person's eligibility to vote. That data is linked to TrueVote before issuance of an election code.
Love that. TrueVote 2.0. There's a lot we can do once we have a functioning election system!
I spell it out in the white paper. TLDR; The userid and ballotid are only known to the voter. They're decoupled when the data is at rest. There's no way anyone can know which voter submitted which ballot.
Even simpler than that. I just call it 'decoupling'. The ballot is verified and hashed using Opentimestamps for everyone to see. The userid and ballotid together are only known to the voter.
I read the whitepaper, but some details are not clear.
If "only the voter" can "prove that the ballot belongs" to him or her, then how can a third-party, an auditor, prove that there was absolutely no possibility of fraud and that the result is provably accurate?
People that check know that their vote has been counted. What about people that don't care? Someone could be voting for them. Or maybe they voted and their vote wasn't counted. Is it assumed that everyone should check?
Don't you have anything more productive to do than make the state more efficient? Have you considered macrame?
In my country Brazil it is a matter of survival, we use Venezuelan electronic voting machines and the majority of the population has lost confidence, popular demonstrations do not match the results and, even approved in previous governments, they do not issue paper proof for later audit.
This is very cool. I would like to see a version that implements AnonDAO like voting. You specify voting rules (quorum, who can participate with what stake) and due to magic of zero knowledge proofs, nothing will be known about the voting, just if the rules were satisfied and what result won.
I think transparency is for a worse in many cases. It enables politicizing, status games and many other things.
But that's not a criticism of this project, as I said, very cool!
View quoted note →Great, this is really missing and needed!
It is a noble effort, but in my humble opinion #Bitcoin makes obsolete and replaces all forms of centralized governance over time, and replaces it with decentralized governance at the sovereign individual level. Voting is a "good try" to keep centralized governance in check. It seems like this is using the next system to try and fix the old and dying system. I don't see them as compatible. But respect nonetheless and just my 2 cents.
