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This takes us back to my first comment. > Vote selling could be an issue with either paper receipts or my protocol above. The best solution for either is proba

This takes us back to my first comment. > Vote selling could be an issue with either paper receipts or my protocol above. The best solution for either is probably outside the system (criminal penalties and significant whistle-blower rewards). You might be able to add deniability to the toy protocol above, but things would get complicated. Extortion and bribery work against individuals some of the time, but using it against large groups of people hoping not even one of them will alert reporters or police? Not to mention, this is a flaw in the current voting system, because people can easily sneak phones into booths to take video of their votes. Being able to confirm that your specific vote was counted should be considered a basic human right. If you look at it that way, it feels strange to deny people a basic right to protect against some harm we don't currently address now, but could easily address in other ways.

dwheeler 7y ago
> Being able to confirm that your specific vote was counted should be considered a basic human right. No, not if that means that many people cannot safely vote. At one time it was considered a right in many jurisdictions that everyone could know what everyone else's vote was, and votes were public. This enabled the local landlords to ensure that bad things happened to people who didn't vote the "right" way. Many vote-confirmation systems allow others to verify the vote as well, and the historical record makes it clear that this can be very dangerous. Currently we can't even verify that votes are counted correctly at all. We currently allow people to press buttons and then have an unverifiable machine report what its owners want the vote to be, without any reasonable way to verify it. It's great to want much more, but let's start with the basics. Having a way to verify that the counted vote is the actual vote is that basic.

dwheeler 7y ago

> Being able to confirm that your specific vote was counted should be considered a basic human right. No, not if that means that many people cannot safely vote. At one time it was considered a right in many jurisdictions that everyone could know what everyone else's vote was, and votes were public. This enabled the local landlords to ensure that bad things happened to people who didn't vote the "right" way. Many vote-confirmation systems allow others to verify the vote as well, and the historical record makes it clear that this can be very dangerous. Currently we can't even verify that votes are counted correctly at all. We currently allow people to press buttons and then have an unverifiable machine report what its owners want the vote to be, without any reasonable way to verify it. It's great to want much more, but let's start with the basics. Having a way to verify that the counted vote is the actual vote is that basic.