4 ms·
I want to be able to make sure my ballot was counted. Give me a public/private key pair when you mail me my ballot or when I leave the polls, and encrypt it in
by sova 6y ago
I want to be able to make sure my ballot was counted. Give me a public/private key pair when you mail me my ballot or when I leave the polls, and encrypt it in such a way that I can confirm the authenticity myself. As a software developer, I will not be convinced that this is not possible.
- whimsicalism 6y agoDo you want to verify that your ballot was counted or that it was counted for a specific candidate? If the former, we already have that. If the latter, that will enable vote buying and is specifically avoided.
- nokcha 6y agoAn important property of our voting system is that it is impossible for a voter to prove (to a third party) how he/she voted. This property is important because it guards against bribing/coercing/pressuring voters to vote for particular candidates. I don't know of any practical way of enabling a voter to check that his/her vote was correctly counted without also compromising the anti-bribery property, especially with a realistic model of the abilities and limitations of most voters.
- whimsicalism 6y agoOnly mildly related, but an interesting suggestion I've seen involved the use of intentionally "poisoned" ballots that people could request/would be sent along with your mail in ballot. These ballots would be verified in the same way as normal ballots, but wouldn't count. Then, you could show a prospective vote buyer a poisoned ballot verified vote which they wouldn't be able to distinguish from a counted vote, rendering vote buying unprofitable.
- rootusrootus 6y agoIIRC this is what Microsoft ElectionGuard aims to do. That was the software that was tried in Texas, failed to gain traction, and now Microsoft has taken it up as a project.