The fact of the matter is: paper is still basically the most advanced voting technology around (from the perspective of auditability, which is crucial)
Just release make everyone's vote semi-public. You can look up what you voted for with a combination of your name + position/ballot-measure + password that's passed through a one-way hash, which generates anonymous voter ID. You can file a complaint what was counted doesn't match who you remember voting for.
Problem is you are incentivizing people to sell their vote or to threaten others to vote a specific way (abusive spouse wants to verify their SO voted a certain way).
The only info we should provide electronically is that your vote was counted at all. Direct value verification would have to be done in person and under supervision.
With widespread mail-in voting an abusive spouse could just fill in the ballot and drop it in the mailbox. No need to verify your spouse’s actions if you can just do it yourself.
In Russia all state employees, say school teachers, are told to vote the right way under no uncertain terms. But come the election day, and it is not physically possible to inspect what everyone is doing with paper ballots. If it was possible to digitally check voting, the regime would be even more repressive.
If you have an abusive spouse, voting is your last problem.
The relevant threat model isn't the abusive spouse who has physical access to your ballot, the relevant threat model is someone without physical access to your ballot being able to verify that you voted the way they wanted you to.
An interesting side-effect of universal mail-in ballots is the detection of fraudulent voter registrations. If ballots addressed to Tinker, Evers, and Chance arrive at 123 Elm Street, which is only occupied by the Smith family,
one should reasonably assume shenanigans, if not felonies.
Not really. My friend who just recently moved got 4 mail in ballots sent to his place this last election, in addition to his own.
Just people who never bothered to update their voter registration.
Completed ballots are supposed to be verified by signature (at least in CA), but I have no idea how thorough this is.
And I imagine if they are mail in, could they even find people who completed all 4 ballots, then dropped them in some random mail box? From what I gather they just reject a vote if they can't match signatures.
Yeah I took a class that talked about this - most people agree that what you'd end up with is companies or individuals forcing you to disclose a hash to prove you voted the way they wanted. Votes kinda need to be unrecoverable at an individual level for this. There's some cool research on "homomorphic encryption" if you want to learn more - it basically opens up the data in aggregate for analysis without being able to disclose information about any individual record in the data, but it's hard to pull off in practice
> Yeah I took a class that talked about this - most people agree that what you'd end up with is companies or individuals forcing you to disclose a hash to prove you voted the way they wanted.
That's what the one-way hash is for. If you're forced to provide a password beforehand, you can provide extra bogus passwords that cast ballots for both sides. The system can allow you to do this an arbitrary number of times.
As far as paper ballots go, nothing stops someone from bullying you into taking a video of you voting and dropping it into the ballot box.
> nothing stops someone from bullying you into taking a video of you voting and dropping it into the ballot box.
And yet this doesn't happen in real life, so it's not a real problem.
Maybe because it's unmanageable and impractical to transfer, store anf watch 50 million videos of voting. But checking a hash is easy and automateable.
Voter registration, not votes. They can tell if you’re registered Democrat or Republican, not if you actually voted for Biden or Trump (even if it could safely be inferred).
nevertheless, you can tell that a voter is a registered D, I, or R. you can tell if they turned in a ballot in a given election.
in jurisdictions where registered voters cannot vote for candidates of the other party (many), then yes, you can then reasonably infer their vote, with a margin of error equal to rates of write-ins for that party in that election.
Way too complicated to implement securely, anonymously and transparently. Going physically somewhere to click on a button after a human identification is probably as technologically advanced as we're going to get in the near future.
I mean sure, with the EU's NFC chips in passports and ID cards there can be an app that compares that to a 3D selfie (there are already apps that do that for lesser government services), but the risks associated in getting it wrong are still too great. Not to mention the lack of transparency which is paramount for a healthy democracy.
It'd be interesting to explore transparent/public voting combined with an in person way to correct/lock_in your vote. Instead of having a voting day let people vote over a month and be able to lock in their vote in person at any time.
Maybe not use it for elections but maybe for polling on issues or a replacement for petitions and/or referendums. Enabling some aspects of direct democracy especially at local levels. But i think this would need to be public or overly transparent to enable people to trust the outcome or become aware of any attacks on the system.
The closest we have to that is paper ballots. You can get your ballot a few weeks in advance and vote then. Then, until the “postmarked no later than” date, you can change your vote if so desired.
But at some point we're going to need to build an interplanetary civilization, so we might as well get started on governance experiments for that future now.
Maybe this is why US can't keep up its space program but China can.
software engineering is like steam engines were in their first 50 years - they could explode at any time, and had multiple spinning parts that will rip off your arm if you are in the wrong place
