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Right? That opaque bit is the crux of the matter. By design, doing that is completely unnecessary! We do not make votes personally identifiable, and that op

Right? That opaque bit is the crux of the matter. By design, doing that is completely unnecessary! We do not make votes personally identifiable, and that opens the door for the rest of the process to be public, trusted, etc... After a bit of research, done back when this crap started, I arrived at these pillars for trustworthy elections: Freedom: Basically, people can vote or not. This puts the burden of garnering votes on those wanting to win elections. It's not a given votes will be cast. Anonymonity: This is all about reinforcing freedom. No vote record = people free to vote their minds with far fewer overall worries than there would be otherwise. If we eliminate this one, electronic votes can make sense, but there are consequences, implications. Not sure it makes sense, but I am open to this discussion. Transparency: It must be possible for any participant in the election to follow their vote cast through the process to the final tally. Human readable vote records, the law, means, methods, all available for anyone to understand. Oversight: Needs transparency, but also the enabling force of law and norms. Not only can people evaluate the elections, but they should do that! We all live by the outcomes. It only makes sense that we all have an interest in trusting the process, and understanding votes cast are legit. I arrived at them being deeply bothered by the input trust problem. Prior to voting machines, this never crossed my mind. We take it for granted. (see my other top level comment) Trustworthy elections embody those ideas to the maximum extent possible. Notice secrecy is not in there? The only place where it is really needed is when the voter casts their vote. All these companies, and to a large degree elections people, and processes, have conflated secrecy with security. Doing that is either a mistake, or nefarious. Which is it?

mcv 7y ago
These are exactly the reasons why Netherland stopped using voting machines. Although interestingly, it was the fact that anonymity could be compromised, that was the final nail, rather than the lack of transparency. With paper votes, anyone is able and allowed to check that every step of the voting process is done fairly. You can see the empty voting boxes before the election starts, you can see that everybody puts their one vote in it, you can be present when they're counted. Dutch law made an explicit exception to these rules to make voting machines possible, and that that was even necessary, should have been a massive red flag. And yet this obvious lack of transparency was not enough to get them banned. Only when hackers proved that anonymity could be threatened, were voting machines banned. Personally I think transparency is more important than anonymity. Compromised transparency enables much larger scale fraud than compromised anonymity, so I'm surprised proving compromised anonymity was even necessary.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Many of us, at least here in the US, are not that secure. Votes are very highly politicized, tensions high, establishment vs people, social right vs social left. Here, we have fraud, but we have a high degree of anonymity. People don't seem to really get it. I am confused as to why. I am reasonably secure myself and could make the same trade off you did, but an awful lot of my peers would not. Super interesting observations. Thanks!

mcv 7y ago

These are exactly the reasons why Netherland stopped using voting machines. Although interestingly, it was the fact that anonymity could be compromised, that was the final nail, rather than the lack of transparency. With paper votes, anyone is able and allowed to check that every step of the voting process is done fairly. You can see the empty voting boxes before the election starts, you can see that everybody puts their one vote in it, you can be present when they're counted. Dutch law made an explicit exception to these rules to make voting machines possible, and that that was even necessary, should have been a massive red flag. And yet this obvious lack of transparency was not enough to get them banned. Only when hackers proved that anonymity could be threatened, were voting machines banned. Personally I think transparency is more important than anonymity. Compromised transparency enables much larger scale fraud than compromised anonymity, so I'm surprised proving compromised anonymity was even necessary.

ddingus 7y ago
Many of us, at least here in the US, are not that secure. Votes are very highly politicized, tensions high, establishment vs people, social right vs social left. Here, we have fraud, but we have a high degree of anonymity. People don't seem to really get it. I am confused as to why. I am reasonably secure myself and could make the same trade off you did, but an awful lot of my peers would not. Super interesting observations. Thanks!