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>The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thin

>The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing. Buying votes is pretty much impossible to do on any meaningful scale undetected. You eliminate it by making it illegal, setting up stings and imposing jail sentences on offenders. It's a terrible reason to avoid any voting system. It's not credit card fraud ffs. The offender advertises their presence by the very nature of what they do.

andrewla 9y ago
You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Criminals will adapt their patterns based on the incentives. If it becomes a valuable market, all you need to do is set up blinds where people send a copy of their ballot to some email address, and then the votes are printed and submitted. Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like. You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it. No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force. >You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult. In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that. The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it. Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
  - andrewla 9y ago
    Why complete secrecy? The person whose vote you are purchasing doesn't even have to know which way their ballot is being used -- they can simply sign it and drop it off at the designated location, or, more feasibly, just scan the signed unfilled ballot and send it to the address they were given in exchange for some Bitcoins or something. The signature isn't a cryptographic one that contains a hash of the votes, it's just an image that can be copied. Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions. As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.

andrewla 9y ago

You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Criminals will adapt their patterns based on the incentives. If it becomes a valuable market, all you need to do is set up blinds where people send a copy of their ballot to some email address, and then the votes are printed and submitted. Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like. You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it. No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force. >You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult. In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that. The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it. Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
- andrewla 9y ago
  Why complete secrecy? The person whose vote you are purchasing doesn't even have to know which way their ballot is being used -- they can simply sign it and drop it off at the designated location, or, more feasibly, just scan the signed unfilled ballot and send it to the address they were given in exchange for some Bitcoins or something. The signature isn't a cryptographic one that contains a hash of the votes, it's just an image that can be copied. Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions. As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.