Redistricting is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions, or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some (soft) preferences to improve fairness...Redistricting is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions, or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some (soft) preferences to improve fairness of the solution. Achieving public consensus on the fairness of proposed redistricting plans is highly desirable. Unfortunately, fair redistricting is an NP hard optimization problem. The complexity of the process makes it even more challenging to convince the public of the fairness of the proposed solution. This paper proposes a completely transparent blockchain based strategy to promote public participation in the redistricting process, to increase public confidence in the outcome of the process. The proposed approach is based on the fact that one does not have to worry about how the NP hard problem was solved, as long as it is possible for anyone to compute a “goodness” metric for the proposed plan. In the proposed approach, anyone can submit a plan along with the expected metric. Only the plan with the best claimed metric needs to be evaluated in a blockchain network.展开更多
A protocol for processing geographic data is proposed to guarantee authoritative and unbiased responses to geographic queries, without the need to rely on trusted third parties. The integrity of the proposed authorita...A protocol for processing geographic data is proposed to guarantee authoritative and unbiased responses to geographic queries, without the need to rely on trusted third parties. The integrity of the proposed authoritative and unbiased geographic services (AUGS) protocol is guaranteed by employing novel hash tree based authenticated data structures (ADS) in conjunction with a blockchain ledger. Hash tree based ADSes are used to incrementally compute a succinct dynamic commitments to AUGS data. A blockchain ledger is used to record 1) transactions that trigger updates to AUGS data, and 2) the updated cryptographic commitments to AUGS data. Untrusted service providers are required to provide verification objects (VOs) as proof-of-correctness of their responses to AUGS queries. Anyone with access to commitments in ledger entries can verify the proof.展开更多
文摘Redistricting is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions, or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some (soft) preferences to improve fairness of the solution. Achieving public consensus on the fairness of proposed redistricting plans is highly desirable. Unfortunately, fair redistricting is an NP hard optimization problem. The complexity of the process makes it even more challenging to convince the public of the fairness of the proposed solution. This paper proposes a completely transparent blockchain based strategy to promote public participation in the redistricting process, to increase public confidence in the outcome of the process. The proposed approach is based on the fact that one does not have to worry about how the NP hard problem was solved, as long as it is possible for anyone to compute a “goodness” metric for the proposed plan. In the proposed approach, anyone can submit a plan along with the expected metric. Only the plan with the best claimed metric needs to be evaluated in a blockchain network.
文摘A protocol for processing geographic data is proposed to guarantee authoritative and unbiased responses to geographic queries, without the need to rely on trusted third parties. The integrity of the proposed authoritative and unbiased geographic services (AUGS) protocol is guaranteed by employing novel hash tree based authenticated data structures (ADS) in conjunction with a blockchain ledger. Hash tree based ADSes are used to incrementally compute a succinct dynamic commitments to AUGS data. A blockchain ledger is used to record 1) transactions that trigger updates to AUGS data, and 2) the updated cryptographic commitments to AUGS data. Untrusted service providers are required to provide verification objects (VOs) as proof-of-correctness of their responses to AUGS queries. Anyone with access to commitments in ledger entries can verify the proof.