Our Community's Homeowner Association Election Turned into a "Who's Lying" Rashomon.

I live in a large residential community with over a thousand households. Last month, our community held elections for a new homeowner association (HOA) committee. There were two factions of candidates, and the competition was incredibly fierce, with canvassing and debates that felt like a presidential election.

On voting day, we all cast our filled-out paper ballots into the red ballot box.

The vote counting process, however, was a disaster. With no professional third-party supervision, the entire count was chaotic. Candidates from both factions supervised each other, each accusing the other of "tampering" with the votes during the count. In the end, Faction A won by a slim margin of 3 votes.

As soon as the results were announced, the community erupted. Supporters of Faction B completely rejected the outcome, convinced the vote had been manipulated. Someone said, "I saw them count several invalid ballots with my own eyes." Another claimed, "Our building had 50 households vote for Faction B, but only 40 votes were counted." But no one could provide concrete evidence. Once the paper ballots were mixed, they could no longer be traced or verified.

An election that was supposed to build community consensus turned into a farce of mutual suspicion and attacks among neighbors. The newly elected HOA committee couldn't gain the trust of all homeowners and was unable to function. The atmosphere in our community became worse than ever before.

During the endless arguments in the homeowners' group chat, a young neighbor who works at an IT company proposed an idea: why don't we use blockchain for voting?

He explained that it wasn't complicated.

1. We could create a voting "smart contract."
2. Each household in the community would receive a unique, anonymous "voting rights token."
3. Within a specified time, everyone would use their "voting rights token" to make a "transaction" to the address of the candidate they support, which represents their vote.
4. All voting records would be recorded in real-time on a public, immutable "public ledger."

In this system, everything is transparent and verifiable. We could see the total vote count in real-time, but we wouldn't know who voted for whom, protecting privacy. When it's time to tally, we wouldn't need to argue. We would just open the public ledger, and the result would be clear for all to see, undeniable and unalterable by anyone. I learned that the essence of this type of voting is a rule-based value transfer, and protocols like BlockATM are designed at their core to ensure that such rule-based transactions are executed precisely and transparently.

His proposal brought a sudden silence to the group chat. We realized that what we lacked wasn't a democratic spirit, but a trustworthy technical tool to support it—a tool that uses procedural transparency to guarantee the fairness of the outcome.

Our community's conflict is not yet resolved. But it has made me understand that whether you're managing a country or a small community, "trust" is the most precious thing. And the best way to build trust is with absolute, verifiable transparency.

In your community or organization, have you ever had conflicts during collective decision-making due to a lack of transparency? Do you think this blockchain voting method could be applied to more scenarios in our lives?