Blockchain Voting App
A custom at a Chinese funeral was to scatter thousands of little square paper confettis, each with a hole in it all along the procession route. The idea was that the devil would have to thread his way through all those little holes to find his way to the soul of the deceased.
That’s the theory behind blockchain. In blockchain each of those little holes in each of those little papers is an encrypted gateway and the intruder has to go through them in precise order, and there are multiple copies each of which have encrypted gateways all in the same order, gatekeepers of which are communicating with each other- and any intrusion can be detected and its source identified if anything in the records doesn’t match up, at any time in the future. This system is almost impregnable. Challenging it is almost impossible. That makes it good for a lot of purposes, especially very important ones.
The drawback to this is that it is very inefficient- maintaining these multiple copies, being able to check them at any time, takes a lot of electricity to do it and it’s very slow. The obvious answer is to make the little sheets of paper into big sheets of paper, carry much more data encapsulated through the process- and only have to backtrack through it when there’s a disparity- and have bad enough consequences for anyone who causes the disparity that nobody challenges it.
Bad consequences are the province of the government, and the government (particularly the part which collects income taxes) doesn’t like secure encryption- except for itself and its own workings. A Bitcoin pioneer, Ross Ulbricht, is serving a potential life sentence as a political prisoner after being framed and convicted of a pile of trumped up offenses because his use of Blockchain encrypted financial dealings of his company, “Silk Road” were considered a threat to national security.
These are the issues blockchain encryption raises, and I chose understanding blockchain for my project, and thought about proposing a blockchain protected online voting app as our class project.
Why is this important? Why do I care about it?
Does everyone here understand the FBI “Russia Investigation” under FBI Special Council Robert Mueller? The allegations are that the Trump Campaign hired a British firm- Cambridge Analytica- to do “opposition research” to help Trump win the election. Cambridge Analytica then bought/stole access to FaceBook data for millions of Americans, and used (or “misused”, depending on whose story you hear) it to profile millions of individual American voters in strategic locations to create specially targeted propaganda to influence voter sentiment and voting choices. That targeted propaganda was allegedly delivered by Russian built and financed “bots” to FaceBook users, disguised as other human Facebook users… “Friends”.
Once the story came out, Cambridge Analytica immediately declared bankruptcy and went black. FaceBook claims to be “cooperating”, but their entire business model is based on selling the data they “mine” from our “free” FaceBook use and giving up their proprietary methods puts them in potentially great legal and financial jeopardy. Mueller is getting serious convictions of Trump campaign operatives on related and unrelated charges, in an effort to compel them to reveal what they know. Trump holds the power of pardon, so there’s a looming Constitutional Crisis- and Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh was chosen because he has an “expansive” view of Presidential Power, including the power to pardon himself. We’re two weeks from the midterm election which will determine the balance of party power in the House of Representatives- which has the exclusive power to impeach the president. The Russians, we hear, are unrelenting in their attempts to influence the 2018 election, as well.
There’s another part of it which includes Wikileaks release of “hacked” Democratic Party internal e-mails which may also have origins in Russian cyber-war strategy towards the same end- the election of Donald Trump. This is a very big deal, and cybersecurity/cyberwarfare is a huge new emerging web technology- and blockchain is the most secure of all current encryption methods. I don’t think students at your age and stage would go wrong learning this important technology.
Last time I spoke about the basic structure of Blockchain- severely limited by my lack of knowledge- and I intended today to talk about “Blockchain in 100 lines of code”, something I found under Chainpro on GitHub by Hacker Noon. But I changed my mind, because I don’t think the class is interested enough in Blockchain to spend the time and effort to understand it, and my interest in it is in its use- not its structure. Joyce suggested I look into clearpoll.com instead to pursue a “blockchain protected voting app”, something they claim to sell- but the blockchain is under their control, and their blockchain code is not accessible. (My clear poll access code is zlxh1j and my username is chrisscolvin. number 835213)
Clear Poll Code. Most of this is pretty easy to read, and if you’re interested in looking at you you can find it on your own as newlibertarians.com/index. I’ll move through it fast.
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Detail Clearpoll Code- Josh’s question, Blockchain.
Note the Blockchain part of the code, _hash_ , _tick_ ,and _clock_ are img src- png’s. I’m not sure what it means, but I think it’s interesting. Perhaps it’s harder to change a png than a txt…?
<div class=”pollQuestion”>Do you feel your government represents you as a citizen?</div><div class=”mainRow”><div class=”detailsContainer”><div class=”field”><img src=”/public/static/media/poll_hash_icon.d796e847.png”/>21651</div><div class=”field”><img src=”/public/static/media/poll_tick_icon.544b0463.png”/>1</div><div class=”field”><img src=”/public/static/media/poll_clock_icon.05f75bb6.png”/>2D 23H</div></div><div class=”contentContainer”><div class=”graphContainer”><div class=”resultContainer”><div class=”resultAnswer”><span class=”resultAnswerText”>Yes</span></div><div class=”graph”><div class=”voteCount”>0</div><div class=”votePercentage”>0%</div><div class=”voteBarContainer”><div class=”voteBarInner” style=”width:0%;background-color:rgba(1, 191, 193, 255)”></div></div></div></div><div class=”resultContainer”><div class=”resultAnswer”><span class=”resultAnswerText”>No</span></div><div class=”graph”><div class=”voteCount”>0</div><div class=”votePercentage”>0%</div><div class=”voteBarContainer”><div class=”voteBarInner” style=”width:0%;background-color:rgba(239, 114, 69, 255)”></div></div></div></div><div class=”resultContainer”><div class=”resultAnswer”><img src=”/public/static/media/poll_tick_icon.544b0463.png”/><span class=”resultAnswerText”>Sometimes</span></div><div class=”graph”><div class=”voteCount”>1</div><div class=”votePercentage”>100%</div><div class=”voteBarContainer”><div class=”voteBarInner” style=”width:100%;background-color:rgba(126, 202, 111, 255)”></div></div></div></div><div class=”resultContainer”><div class=”resultAnswer”><span class=”resultAnswerText”>Null</span></div><div class=”graph”><div class=”voteCount”>0</div><div class=”votePercentage”>0%</div><div class=”voteBarContainer”><div class=”voteBarInner” style=”width:0%;background-color:rgba(240, 113, 140, 255)”></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class=”voteControlContainer”><div class=”voteControl”>Hide Vote</div></div><div class=”socialContainer”><div class=”socialBanner”>Share this poll!</div><div class=”socialButtons”><a target=”_blank” href=”https://twitter.com/share?url=https://web.clearpoll.com/poll/21651″><img src=”/public/static/media/twitter_icon.ea04b00c.png”/></a><a target=”_blank” href=”https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?
After banging my head against the wall for a few hours I decided on something else.
In my second semester of Interactive Web I managed to cop the codes to Trump’s campaign polls. So, I’ve decided to explore that instead. Blockchain is a little too much for us, I think. We’ll go to plebiscite page, and first we’ll look at first plebiscite poll. I used the code from Trump’s “Final Debate Poll” sent out before the election, to create my own poll by substituting my questions and answers and put it up as a demonstration. My idea was to use polls to fathom the “Will of the People” and create a political party which was pledged to represent the Constituency- not the Party, Party Ideology, or the corrupting Big Money behind the parties. As a Representative, I thought I could poll the constituency in real time on every vote I had to make, and essentially become the “avatar” of the electorate. I called it “Direct Democracy via the Internet”.
I also thought it would be informative (and “revolutionary”) to display the RESULTS of Trump’s polls- something he never did. (Bernie didn’t either…his polls were obviously bogus, but Trump’s were pretty convincing. Instead, I expect he either never bothered to tabulate the data, or else gave the data to Cambridge Analytica for their ‘project- to influence the electorate with targeted propaganda. But he never shared it. I hoped I could tell from the code if it were a “real” poll, or just a “dummy” propaganda poll- to make the electorate BELIEVE he was actually paying attention to what The People want- or not.
I’d also like to be able to understand how it works, so I could administer good polls, and display accurate results to my polls- or to polls I could build for other candidates. So, lets look at them.
It all looks familiar, except csrfmiddlewaretoken… what’s that?
