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> the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat there's at least one feature about elections in the US that makes
by daveevad 4y ago
> the fact that no single group/party/cabal/whatever has managed to disproportionately cheat
there's at least one feature about elections in the US that makes detecting cheating pretty difficult. there's no good way for me to verify that my vote was recorded a specific way subsequent to casting it.
- ajross 4y agoWhich jurisdictions implement that feature? Prior to advent of modern cryptography it wasn't even possible (well, without giving up the secret ballot, which is how you get vote buying and coercion).
- daveevad 4y agoI am not aware of any precisely because of the concerns you raised with buying and coercion. I am not aware how modern cryptography allows this either, while preserving secret ballot. Please let me know if there are advancements that render my opinion incorrect. I just think it is a really interesting information-security problem that seems intractable. My personal opinion is paper ballots and in-person voting is probably the most effective pair of policies at preventing wide-spread voting fraud.
- ajross 4y agoYeah, no one actually does this. The point about cryptography was me being glib, but the math does exist. The relevant subfield is "homomorphic encryption" and I remember seeing a paper over the last few years (probably linked here on HN if I had to guess) claiming to have an election-relevant algorithm that was supposed to be workable in practice. I can't find it right now though.