Hey guys,
I just came up with this rough idea [VOTE] Votecoin to replace the aging electronic voting industry dominated by Diebold and co. Please note I came up with this half asleep so it'll need some fine tuning.
We would use the blockchain to verify the votes per national/state ID #. Each vote would only be able to be cast once per campaign, however it could possible to color a coin for different voting campaigns i.e. State, Local, Federal etc. There would be privacy issues involved though with disclosing private info on the blockchain so privacy technology would be something to consider in the scheme. I think if the concept were applied correctly it could reduce voter fraud to 0, while saving taxpayers billions of dollars in government contracts to private voting machine corporations. I think Bitcoin is doing an excellent job of decentralizing finance, but if we really want change and accountability we need to take back our votes from the private corporations. The concept of the block explorer when applied to voting could be an amazing weapon against political election/campaign. For example, being able to visibly see the voting results by searching your own transaction number to see if your own vote was calculated correctly.
I would be happy to fund the project if we can get some of the top minds in Crypto involved. I'm really not sure how we would monetize the operation because selling votes is illegal. However, I believe coming up with an incentive to have miners secure the network other than patriotism could bring in an entirely new generation into the crypto scene. Maybe putting the actual idea up as an asset/stock on an exchange and splitting the dividends to coin holders. Maybe the government contract funds could be used to purchase stock in the asset exchange then redistributed back to the voters?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold "Revenue: US$ 2.99 billion (FY 2012)[1]" according to wikipedia 2.4% of that is from Diebold Election Systems and this is just one of the major companies involved in the USA.
Look forward to hearing some feedback and moving this project forward.