Changing Ballot Votes

[j0xhn]

Title

  Title: Change Vote
  Layer: Voting dApp

Abstract

Once a vote has been submitted, have the ability to change your vote by either changing from yes => no, no => yes, or abstain.

Rationale

There are both pros and cons to this idea.

Pros:

• If new information comes to light, votes can change to reflect new information. Might be useful for long votes that last over a week? But not so much if only 2 days.
• Removes need to wait until last minute, which might cause people to miss the vote entirely. This would enable people to vote as soon as they heard about a ballot and not feel like they needed to wait until the last minute

Cons:

• People might change their vote in order to not appear like they were on the losing side. Then future people would see that 100% voted yes/no and would feel a bias "because everyone else voted that way so it must be absolutely right for a reason"
• Purchasing votes. If vote is close and everyone has voted, someone could possibly pay for a winning vote. This attack vector is actually possible without changing votes as well, because someone could just pay an undecided voter to vote in the desired direction.

[6proof]

This would go against the thousands of years old democratic practice of the ballot box - once a vote is cast it is immutable. This makes it impossible to bribe, intimidate or extort someone to change their vote in the case of a close election. We are all encouraged to vote only when we have considered our options and be bound by our actions. Thank you for presenting for discussion, and I encourage all to maintain the current method.