… you don’t want to use a centralized database for votes exactly for the same reasons you don’t want to use a blockchain for votes, unless you’re doing some sort of zero-knowledge stuff in the background and what gets written to the DB doesn’t allow the system operators to tell who exactly voted for who while still being able to tally the votes correctly. Even having a request increment a counter in the DB would mean it’d be possible to look at logs or traffic between the db, backend and frontend, and tell that when request X came in, candidate Y’s counter was incremented. This is why most if not all electronic vote systems right now are completely fucked and a terrible security risk, there’s way too many possible options for manipulating them. Centralizing the vote db wouldn’t fix the problem, it’d just, well, centralize it.