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You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its pre

You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option. Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.

mariusor 5y ago
I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question. The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  To be clear, the property we want is, broadly speaking, "hard to tamper with (at scale) without getting caught". Ideally we would also catch tampering at small scale, but that's darn close to incompatible with denying vote buying. (A possible resolution is, of course, "well, what's wrong with vote buying between informed consenting adults?" But the unfortunate history shows that our electoral systems must compensate for underinformed coerced voters, and their regulations are written in blood.) Existing voting systems do have a countermeasure, if not a fantastic one: creating a trail of physical artifacts that can be manually audited to verify vote totals, and a roll of accepted votes to compare the count of said physical artifacts against. It's not fantastic because the error rates on those physical artifacts are stupendous, but tampering with votes at scale can then require (a) physical access, which humans are well-equipped to reason about, and (b) generating and destroying big piles of said physical artifact, which is expensive and expensive to hide. The gold standard of tampering with physical elections that we know of is basically denying observers the chance to audit, which is rightly considered suspicious. Tampering with electronic votes at scale does not have these cost properties. We can magnify costs without giving voters the ability to prove their votes to a third party (I am aware there are probabilistic constructions), but all such constructions (a) are much harder for the average voter to reason about than monitoring physical access (humans are quite optimized for monitoring physical access), yet (b) requires voters to actually audit their own votes and report non-inclusion en masse. You can see why this is a non-starter.
  - mariusor 5y ago
    I don't know if you realize, but you moved the goal posts a little. Yes I agree that an electronic system would be more difficult to wrap your mind around as a layperson, but if you go now on the street and you ask someone how paper ballots work in their district, I bet that even though they know the big picture, they will fail at the details. So the common person will probably not understand the cryptographic underlayers of this theoretical new system, they need to have confidence "in the science". I know that doesn't sound as good, but we're heading towards a world where computing literacy is increasing, so in some years that could be possible.

mariusor 5y ago

I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question. The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.

naniwaduni 5y ago
To be clear, the property we want is, broadly speaking, "hard to tamper with (at scale) without getting caught". Ideally we would also catch tampering at small scale, but that's darn close to incompatible with denying vote buying. (A possible resolution is, of course, "well, what's wrong with vote buying between informed consenting adults?" But the unfortunate history shows that our electoral systems must compensate for underinformed coerced voters, and their regulations are written in blood.) Existing voting systems do have a countermeasure, if not a fantastic one: creating a trail of physical artifacts that can be manually audited to verify vote totals, and a roll of accepted votes to compare the count of said physical artifacts against. It's not fantastic because the error rates on those physical artifacts are stupendous, but tampering with votes at scale can then require (a) physical access, which humans are well-equipped to reason about, and (b) generating and destroying big piles of said physical artifact, which is expensive and expensive to hide. The gold standard of tampering with physical elections that we know of is basically denying observers the chance to audit, which is rightly considered suspicious. Tampering with electronic votes at scale does not have these cost properties. We can magnify costs without giving voters the ability to prove their votes to a third party (I am aware there are probabilistic constructions), but all such constructions (a) are much harder for the average voter to reason about than monitoring physical access (humans are quite optimized for monitoring physical access), yet (b) requires voters to actually audit their own votes and report non-inclusion en masse. You can see why this is a non-starter.
- mariusor 5y ago
  I don't know if you realize, but you moved the goal posts a little. Yes I agree that an electronic system would be more difficult to wrap your mind around as a layperson, but if you go now on the street and you ask someone how paper ballots work in their district, I bet that even though they know the big picture, they will fail at the details. So the common person will probably not understand the cryptographic underlayers of this theoretical new system, they need to have confidence "in the science". I know that doesn't sound as good, but we're heading towards a world where computing literacy is increasing, so in some years that could be possible.