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Comment by sgeisenh | Hacker News Reader

I trust good digital voting systems more than a paper ballot.

Specifically, the system should be auditable in a way that makes it difficult to trace individual votes back to voters, but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly.

There must be a good way to accomplish this while also addressing potential voter fraud. Does anybody know of any research in this area?

With paper ballots, I have no way of knowing whether or not my vote was counted correctly. And I find that really unsettling.

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I sat and counted votes just a month ago. In order to cheat I'd have had to managed to destroy the votes sitting around a table with nine other people, none of whom I'd ever met before. The public, of course, is also welcome during the whole proccess. You can sit and watch the counting if you want to.

I prefer a physical thing that somebody has to physically steal, hide, replace, destroy. Something that can be signed for, locked up, and monitored with cameras for years after an election.

Computers are about convenience. Elections are important enough to do things the hard way.

Paper gives you natural decentralization. Computers will tend to be purchased from and serviced by a small number of companies.

Paper please.

>but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly.

If everyone can prove how they voted it becomes much easier to intimidate or incentivize people to vote a certain way.

That is indeed the main issue with verifiable voting. The usual solutions offer various compromises, but it is not possible to both guarantee the ability to verify that one's ballot is counted correctly, and that you cannot prove for whom you voted.

We count votes several times, using different people. All counting is done under observation. Everyone on the ballot can demand a recount under their supervision, within reason (you can’t demand infinite recounts).

The people who count votes are either trusted employees of the muniplacity, members of a politician party or NGOs. I guess in a two party system it’s hard to understand why politician party members are impartial, but when you have several parties they govern each other + they don’t get to count their own votes, and there is at least one recount of only officials.

I’m not sure what system would be safer.

Without a paper trail you have no evidence. I guess you could use blockchain, but realistically, it would never be decentralized and 99% of the voters wouldn’t understand it well enough to know whether or not the software actually did what they intended, making it much unsafer.

That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements. In theory you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a particular way to ensure you can't be intimidated into changing you vote.

Unless it's good enough to verify whether your vote was counted, that should be fairly easy to do.

> That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements

Untrue. You can use strong encryption to ensure confidentiality and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure integrity. Then, you can use methods from homomorphic encryption to tally the ballots. There is a whole area of research dedicated to this.

So in your opinion the problem is (theoretically) solved? As in, we can have anonymous, verifiable, online, direct democracy such that 3rd parties cannot verify your vote without your private key?

As I said in another comment, individual verifiability and non-coercion are mutually exclusive online. However, there are indeed solutions for the other properties (including global integrity), and compromises between individual verifiability and non-coercion. For instance, you can have a look at Helios [1] or Belenios [2]. Current research is looking for stronger guarantees, a better compromise, or a more interesting voting system (such as Single Transferable Vote or Majority Judgment).

[1] https://vote.heliosvoting.org/

[2] http://www.belenios.org/

Yes, it's possible, and it is an area of research in cryptography. For instance, have a look at Helios and Belenios.

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