> Voting doesn't have to be any different From your long sibling thread I gather that for you it is more important to be able to verify the votes by yourself t

> Voting doesn't have to be any different From your long sibling thread I gather that for you it is more important to be able to verify the votes by yourself through the output of the voting system (the excel example) than to be able to reason through the voting system itself. Whereas for schroeding it is more important to be able to conceptually understand and scrutinize the voting process as a whole, even though it might be difficult for any single individual to check on that their own vote was counted. Correct me if the summary was not fair. Suppose we bring the two ideas to the extreme and imagine two voting systems: - an extermely complex, completely opaque voting system that can only be managed by experts to function correctly, but with a perfectly infallible way to individually check that their vote was correctly counted - an extremely obvious and straightforward way of voting such as paper ballots that are securely physically transported to a central location (all of them) and counted by people surrounded by observers (all in one sitting). clearly any individual cannot check that their vote was actually counted If there is a disagreement about the result of a vote because, let's say for the sake of the example that the losing party thinks they should have won; In the first system everybody can of course check their votes, but what if the losing party questions the checking system itself? Then it is on the experts to justify why the vote is correct (can they do it?). On the second system, because everybody can reason through it, it is on the losing party to prove that the vote was not performed correctly, by pointing at some part of the (simpler) voting procedure. I think that the second system is more robust in the sense that when there is a disagreement, it is easier regain everyone's trust. With simple procedures, the disagreeing party can make more meaningful demands on the people who manage the voting system to check that the vote was correct. In the first system it is the opposite, and because by definitions it is only understood by experts the losing party cannot do anything but to claim that the whole system is rigged. So, since voting systems are ultimately a tool to collectively take decisions, I'd say that there is more value in having a simple procedure than efficiency and extremely precise feedback for individual votes. The trust in voting systems is different than the one in credit card processing systems. Of course real electronic voting and real paper voting are neither of these two extremes, but choosing the e-voting moves us closer to the first system, while paper voting to the second.