Part of it is that webcams are nearly impossible to buy since the pandemic arose, but apart from that, webcam image quality is terrible - even expensive webcams in the price range of ~100's of Euro.
A recent iPhone will wipe the floor with any webcam I've come across, short of an SLR or mirrorless camera.
I was being slightly facetious in referencing tyre size, although people regularly have to adjust speedo/odometers by 10% or more when fitting large tyres on off-roaders.
Odometers can have their values changed at will, at least in ICE vehicles, often for valid reasons.
Similarly, in Ireland where we run 230VAC single phase, three phase 400VAC allows up to 22kW to be delivered, which is about to become extremely useful as we migrate to electric transportation.
Also, on safety, I don't know the statistics, but subjectively, electricity feels much more dangerous in the US because of the plug and socket design.
The GDPR does not allow the processing of personal data at all without out a legal basis, and the prevention of unlawful data processing does not require that you submit any identifying details at all!
A company may verify the identify of a person making a deletion request for data processed under a valid legal basis, which seems unlikely to be the case here.
> I just think the above argument was made from a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain technology.
Which misunderstanding of blockchains/merkle trees do you believe has caused the argument above to be incorrect?
The system as described in the patent provides no protection that I can see against voter coercion, and in some embodiments, allows a voter to verify that their vote has been counted as cast, which is significantly more ripe for abuse than in-person or even postal voting.
I did read your other comments in this thread, but it seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain technology and the problems that it can solve. Your proposed right-to-vote token solution is worse in every way than paper ballots cast in-person at polling stations with private areas, counted by hand in publicly observable count centres.
It's certainly not a ridiculous argument. Anonymity is a cornerstone of fair voting systems, and any system that allows votes to be deanonymised increases the risk of coercion.
The same type of risk applies to postal voting, although with less severity, as with postal voting there is only one opportunity to check the coerced vote. Blockchain based votes can be checked after the fact.
Still, for this reason, postal voting is rare, and most countries that allow it do so only for citizens living abroad or who cannot travel to a polling station die to injury or illness.
Countries like the UK and Australia that allow any eligible voter to do so by mail are rare.
> Currently, the stethoscope resulting from this project functions as well as the market gold standard, the Littmann Cardiology III
If this is true, it's a major achievement.