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> Imagine if we had a secure system alongside the paper ballots that involved Merkle Trees and multi-factor verification for voting, so everyone could verify th

> Imagine if we had a secure system alongside the paper ballots that involved Merkle Trees and multi-factor verification for voting, so everyone could verify theirvote and participation would be higher And rely on the same people who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan on the butterfly ballot to understand merkle trees and verify their vote? We already know how to increase participation if we wanted to - mandatory voting like they do in Australia. Paper ballots work fine as long as they aren't silly designs like the butterfly ballot or the hole punch. Filling in circles with a pen and then running it through the machine yourself to verify the ballot is machine readable works very well.

EGreg 5y ago
Um, no. Do you expect people who use banking apps to understand bank-level security, elliptic curve cryptography, key generation and so forth? You just give them a freaking app, to scan their vote on a website, confirm it's voting for the correct thing, and sign with their private key. Then they can check that their vote was included in the final tally (don't mention Merkle trees). OK? The real question is, how do you make sure each person has only one vote (see this for example https://www.geekwire.com/2015/the-next-fraud-wave-when-banks-cash-the-same-check-twice-you-might-have-to-pay/ https://www.geekwire.com/2015/the-next-fraud-wave-when-banks...) without revealing the identity of every voter to the government. And also how do you prevent the final tally from being revealed to anyone until it's all ready? That last one is the hardest one (and we fail at doing it in our elections, the media already predicts the winner before the polls close).