A great virtue of blockchains is the transparency at their core. As described above, everyone can see the ledger of every action recorded in the blockchain. Aside from voter anonymity, there are no secrets.
For this reason, blockchains are often called “trustless”, because they eliminate the need for trust between strangers. Everything is recorded transparently, for all to see. Until now, proposals for online democracy have run up against well-founded concerns over online security. Electronic voting machines are notoriously vulnerable to hacking; votes cast over the conventional internet can be hacked in transmission; and if the overall vote count is stored on a server, the count is hackable. Such risks are unacceptable in democratic decision-making, particularly since margins of popular approval or disapproval may at times be thin. Blockchains solve these problems.