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Comment by Infernal | Hacker News Reader

There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots, so there is no incentive to bribing or threatening violence to influence your vote.

The desired outcome is to prove that each vote came from a valid voter, while being impossible to prove which vote came from whom.

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There is a cryptographic primitive that does just this allowing of plausible deniability whilst ensuring that only persons able to vote voted: Using Linked Ring Signatures.

> There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots.

The coercing party can insist that you take a mobile phone picture of your ballot. This kind of coercion is common in some regions of Russia where civil servants and teachers are told by their superiors that they must vote for the preferred party “or else”, and a mobile phone picture is demanded as proof.

The way around this is to give each person 1 ballot for each of N candidates. 1 ballot goes into an envelope and into the vote box. N-1 ballots go into envelopes and into the discard box. It's trivial to show a photo of your ballot for Dr. Evil, but it would take a video of you going into the voting booth, closely following your hands to prevent three-card-monty, and continuing to follow you into the public lobby containing the vote and discard boxes. If you strictly enforce no recording in the public lobby, then there's no way for you to prove to your boss which box got your ballot for Dr. Evil in the end.

Edit: Perhaps I wasn't clear. Each of the N ballots is already filled out for a different candidate. The envelopes are all identical and sealed by you inside the voting booth. That way an existence proof of a ballot for the given candidate leaks absolutely no information. There are no empty paper ballots, and none of the paper ballots can leave the polling station. Ballots need to be counted both from the "vote" and from the "discard" boxes. Ballots missing from the discard box prove vote tampering.

I suspect the envelope with the good ballot is sealed in some way. All they would have to do in that case is force you to take a picture of the sealed ballot with the non-desired ballots next to it.

All of the envelopes are identical. Absolutely the only difference is which envelope goes into which ballot box. Taking a photo of N-1 ballots for non-Dr. Evil next to one sealed envelope only discloses that the Dr. Evil ballot was put into an envelope first. It gives no information as to which box that envelope was placed into later, and therefore leaks no information about how the vote was cast.

So you just need to take N photos with the correct voteon every ballot. No matter which will be discarted.

But each ballot is pre-filled out for a different candidate. The vote fixer already knows what's on all of your ballots, they just don't know which goes into which box. Photos showing what's on the ballot don't disclose any information. The attacker already knows that you have one ballot pre-filled for each candidate. The only secret is which ballot goes in which box.

You go into the voting booth, seal the N ballots in the N identical envelopes, being sure to keep track of where the ballot for your desired candidate is. You leave the voting booth and drop the one envelope in the vote box, and the N-1 envelopes in the discard box.

Even if you're forced to videotape inside the voting booth of your sealing the N ballots in the N identical envelopes, you could pull a quick 3-card-monty when leaving the voting booth. Even a quick random shuffle would be sufficient to statistically nullify your vote, or if you're only able to keep track of where the Dr. Evil ballot is, a quick deal from the bottom of the deck would guarantee a vote for a random opposition candidate. As long as there's some spot between the polling both and the ballot boxes that isn't covered by video, there's no way for a third party to know which ballot went where.

You aren't allowed to leave the polling station with any of the envelopes, and a tally of the ballots in the discard box will show what percentage of people have left the polling station with their discarded ballots. Any non-negligible percentage of "discard" ballots leaving the polling station will make the whole vote suspect. (The discard ballot count will also provide circumstantial evidence for which way the tampering is going, although Dr. Evil will always claim it's false flag vote tampering to make him look bad).

If someone is really coerced in sneaking their discard ballots out of the polling station, they could sneak N-1 ballots out and either put the ballot for Dr. Evil in the discard box or burn it right outside the polling station. They then show the jackbooted thugs the other N-1 ballots. They end up not voting, but at least Dr. Evil is denied the vote.

Well there's no need for an elaborate scheme like this, certainly no need for video. The buyer gives a paper ballot that's already marked for Dr. Evil, and asks the vote seller to bring back the empty paper ballot to get paid. It's that simple :( and being done in the places which still uses paper ballots.

There are no empty paper ballots, and if a ballot is brought back, then it's not in the discard box. Since votes in the discard box are still tallied, if someone leaves the polling station with a ballot, it will be obvious that someone has tampered with the election.

You could just avoid counting any vote in the "count" box that doesn't have a matching vote in the "discard" box.

We try to combat this in two ways in Germany (not that it currently poses a problem but still): 1. Voters can destroy their ballot before putting it into the box and get a new one for any reason thus making it possible to create fake proof. 2. Taking pictures inside the booth is explicitly prohibited (which stated on signs in the booth) and if the poll workers notice you taking a picture they require you to destroy the ballot and fill out a new one. I actually had to do this to a women last election who wanted to post a picture on social media – and didn't turn off the shutter sound.

This requires the poll workers to be somewhat impartial. If they are not all bets are off. In the German Democratic Republic voters where socially pressured (by official policy) to not use the booths at all.

Taking pictures in the booth isn't actually prohibited. You can do it but the helpers will probably take your ballot and destroy it, then give you another one.

(An exception is when you are a government delegate voting for chancellor, in which case you pay a fine of 1000€, especially after the president has clarified this rule to new delegates repeatedly)

It depends on your definition (there is no fine or anything) but it's now explicitly prohibited and poll workers are required to reject such voters (and give them a new ballot), see § 56 Abs. 2, 6 Nr. 5a BWO.

We've actually had members of parliament in the Netherlands proudly show of the selfies they took in the ballot booth with their ballot on Twitter, encouraging people to take selfies (nicknamed 'stemfies'; a portmanteau of vote ('stem') and selfie) to show that (and how!) you voted on social media.

The election council and a lot of privacy-conscious citizens weren't amused to say the least, but a subsequent ruling by a judge turned out that it isn't strictly speaking illegal, because the law doesn't explicitly prohibit photography in the ballot booth. So until parliament enacts a law that forbids it (like Germany), we are stuck with this rather dubious phenomenon.

At least we've banned voting computers for a good while — the ones we had ran closed source software and the votes cast couldn't be verified by the voters or the election council — so there's that.

Why is that any different from being anonymous on a blockchain?

It isn’t unless you have some way to verify your vote. Lots of blockchain ideas offer that, though.

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