Thank you, that was an interesting read. Both about the clash with hivewatchers, and the one about election. I was few years away and I lost track of politics, views, etc, but I remember them from steem/steemcleaners, and views on what can be considered spam and what not always sparked heated discussions even at that time.. On one hand I can see how, roughly speaking, 64kb x 4 times a day can easily explode to gigabytes/year. Yes, I know, this ball-park calculation is uber-weak. USA does not vote 24/7 and whole year round. But this counter argument is just as weak, because if more states/countries jump in, volume can explode, and both sides of the fence can throw their mudballs like that forever.

On the other hand, I see your reasoning too. If you, or a group, are willing to provide necessary HP/RC for that, and even deny rewards, then wtf? It's not spam for profit. If I recall how some games or dapps dumped trash-like posts enmasse on the stream, and somehow it was OK, and profited from that, and ended up dying due to lack of ppl interest, I can't see why your was not-OK, considering that this application could actually promote Hive as a platform. And considering how "hot" is the topic, I wouldn't be surprised if, your project actually got external interest and extra funding to run. I skip over the fact that it might be hard to make this project seem "legit" and "trustworthy" for other people, but that rarely stopped an archivist, and history shows, after time passes, archives are collected, analyzed, confronted, cross-verified, and are much valued later than at time of birth.

Yet, on yet another hand, as if I had three of them, that vision of yours further down the road, where ballots are scanned and posted and so on.. To be honest, this I can't imagine done the same way. Raw image scan of every paper ballot? I might have misunderstood, but it sounds like several orders of magnitute of data volume.. Core chain itself is not a general-purpose database or a file store for media.. at least I think :P I also won't risk making idiot of myself trying to estimate the potential data size, there's too many compression formats/codecs, even color spaces, degree-of-lossiness, etc. But absolutely for sure, actual files could be stored elsewhere, and chain could be used to store hashes/fingerprints/signatures of those to provide some degree of 'authenticity' for those snapshots, apps for analyzing,supporting,maintenance,etc and organizing some general access to the data, etc..

Aaanyways.. I started flying off the matter - I just wanted to thank you for the explanation and link to the article :) Interesting read, on many levels!