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Comment by banned1 | Hacker News Reader

(1) Things are crazy right now. As an example that is relevant for the HN audience, Republican voters would feel the wrath and hysteria of Liberals in San Francisco who would kick them out of companies or demand their dismissal. The same would happen to Democrat voters in some Republican stronghold in a Red state.

(2) Probably not in a long time in the US. The system is built under the assumptions that you can't trust voters know what is good for them, let alone what is good for the country overall.

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(1) What if we gave everyone a voter uuid that they could verify on a website where hundreds of millions of other voteruuids and votes are posted for verification

Yes, this is an excellent idea. I had read somewhere (other posters here make this point) that we could give this UUID to each voter. Then, we could give voters a way to verify their vote in the final tallies. This way, if enough voters see their vote has been changed, we could detect government interference, hacking, or other forms of fraud.

Indeed, I believe it really is that simple.

It also enables the local political machine/union/gang to come to your house post election and force you to show that you voted they way they ordered you to vote on pain of pain.

Not allowing people to photograph their ballots, to vote in public, etc. is a protective measure for the voter making it difficult to prove how they voted.

Then find a random uuid in the public list and claim it is yours? I don't think that is a realistic fear

I'm pretty sure 'no one' would remember their random UUID so they'd have to be written down or recorded somewhere and whatever form that would take would be what someone would demand you produce if they wanted to know how you voted.

You're suggesting playing the lottery that some random uuid will have voted the way the malefactor has ordered you to vote?

It's a real issue. There are lots of people who have jobs that they use to support their families where they have to deal with organizations that they disagree with politically. Currently they can pay lip service in public, but vote their conscience in private. Making how people voted public record would affect a lot of people. Substantially more than, for example, the number of people who would be inconvenienced by universal voter id laws.

The hole in this system is that there is still no good mechanism for verification, at least in my eyes. What is to stop a tamperer from creating UUIDs not associated with a citizen? That's why I would consider tying to a person quite publicly.

At the same time, perhaps such a system reduces the surface area for bad actors. Now, perhaps, just the registry/database of UUIDs is a primary target.

The trend of wanting to give every citizen random ids tied to their identity is very scary. Also 'WE" won't give anyone anything. It will be a registration with a government agency that will eventually lead to their rights being violated by the govenrment at some point in the future. Why is it people want to do the government's job of infringing on rights with some faux altruistic intent.

Hmm, great point I did not think of. Doesn't the government already know your identity and voting record however? Not that that is not already scary, but if the point is to avoid fraud, then it is not incrementally scarier from a privacy perspective? Not that that is not depressing that we have to look for "holding the line" instead of reducing government's visibility into people's actions.

Parent may have worded it poorly, I don't see why you couldn't be given a UUID for your vote that could be checked online later.

how many promises of "no personal information will be stored" have we, as people in various levels of the tech field, know for a fact is a tricky worded lie.

Well that's why it needs to be open sourced.

If the voter can prove that they've voted some way, then their spouse/boss/landlord will just demand that they show their record of voting the way they wanted you to. This destroys the secret ballot.

On 1, secrecy of ballot is fundamental to a open democracy. Otherwise, selling your ballot becomes very easy. Without secret ballots, there's no market for votes, because you can't verify I didn't just take your money and run.

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