Direct Vote
Direct votes are cast in The Consumerium Exchange
This is perhaps a little unfair since people who don't have access to computer systems are likely unable to use their direct vote. Burden of proof on authentication is yet to be solved. A partial solution could be to divide the direct votes into three distinct groups and let the consumers decide on the amount of trust they place on each group of voters:
- Voters authenticated with cryptographic methods, where the identity of the keyholder is known by an commercial or non-commercial certification authority.
- Voters authenticated by an email address issued by an institutional issuer such as an university, school, company or a governmental organisation ie. where it is publicly known that the postmaster checks the identities of people before issuing an email address
- The rest ie. anonymous email services
Whether the direct votes are anonymized or visible or whether decision on this is left up to the voter on each issue is yet unclear.
As you might have guessed the system for direct voting relies on the vote-challenge-confirmation scheme used by many web based services ie. You get an email that says that "somebody (propably you) voted on these and these issues with your account and to confirm this you have to reply something to this message". As a counter measure to votebots the email will contain a small graphic file or ascii pattern with some symbols that the voter has to include in the reply.