Are We Creating An Orwellian Technocracy?

Government & Politics Elections
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I never thought of the blockchain in this way until recently after I stumbled upon the fact that you can see who voted for who. Not only that but anybody can go to the Liberland Blockchain and see this as a public record. The only places that I can think of in modern times where a vote is not private is in a dictatorship or some other type of regime where your vote is “private” but the intel agencies have ways to tell who you voted for like Nazi Germany or North Korea.

UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 21.3 says, “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” What is this “equivalent free voting procedure”?, that is an interesting question and in terms of ethics I have to lean towards the secret ballot because if you do not have secret ballots a person can easily be intimidated, coerced, black balled, blackmailed or even face far worse perils.

After I voted for the first time last week in the referendum to approve the SORA bridge I realized you could also see who else voted and how many merits each person holds.

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Afterward I remembered that one could also look at who voted for whom in the Congressional elections.

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Here you can see how many people voted for each candidate, but also who did the voting and how many merits were used towards each candidate. By having this knowledge one can structure their merits to ensure that a candidate they don’t want to win won’t and I think that is why we saw such a dynamic finish in the last few days of the most recent Congressional election as the vote tallies were constantly changing until the exact moment the election ended.

Some may argue this is the future of elections but I will say for my part that I don’t know if I want the way I voted to be forever a public record.

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This is the problem with our “modern” democracy and our “modern” politicians which are conditioning us. Many important decisions which affects ALL of us, are taken without our knowledge by someone who is “secret”.

Let us look at this from different point of view.

If something is important to us, we announce it openly and we’re ready to defend our decisions. E.g. our marriage, our children, our money, our land, our cars…ehh, our iPhone. :wink:

What about our Land and people which govern it? Secret decisions?

If it’s enough important to me, I stand for what I have decided/voted until the situation/person changes and I’ll vote differently. Which, in our blockchain, is possible every 3 months. :slight_smile: That’s the beauty of it.

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An interesting observation Tadeo it forces us to defend our votes just as elected public officials are expected to do. I never thought of it that way but it does make sense, we do have to defend ourselves in all other areas of life why not how we voted too.

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This seems like it could be remedied with a default being set to show votes as private, but allow for transparency if one wishes. The option to make your vote public could be useful for people in positions of trust or public view. Since Liberland uses Substrate for the blockchain, this could be theoretically implemented.