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Comment by pbz | Hacker News Reader

How about this? 1) you go to vote with your voting card 2) you get a paper printout of your vote 3) the voting machine then broadcasts your vote (only IDs) to N independent checkers; this makes your vote public but anonymous 4) later you check the printout against your favorite online checker to make sure it registered properly

To make all this work the paper and electronic trail is digitally signed with something that's only on your voting card.

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This leads to the problem of letting _other people_ force you to show them how you voted.

This is a real problem! The secret vote isn't just about making sure that you can choose privately, but also about making sure that other people don't have ways of coercing you into certain choices.

Our current system allows others to know how you voted, postal votes are coercible and not secret. Your coercer could post your vote so electronic voting is only as vulenerable in this respect as our current system.

There are ways to solve this issue with cryptography.

Only if the crypto is designed to be run in your head, so that you can lie to someone who wants proof. Good luck implementing that through education.

Consider the simplest case, a binary choice. The system tells you (and only you, and only once and without tangible record) that the public copy will either be inverted or not, a one bit one time pad. Kind of feasible, but already hard enough: will you really assume tampering when the bit that makes the public record match your vote does not match your memory? Then imagine scaling to something more meaningful than a binary vote, even just to more than one binary. I can't see that actually working out.

No there aren't. If you can check your vote, then your abusive spouse, your boss or somebody else who has power over you, can force you to show them your vote.

Not neccessarily, you can have a system where you can retrieve 'proof' of having voted in any way you want, and you can verify via some secret information used when voting, but making the UX of such a feature good enough that it's actually usable by someone in those circumstances is not at all easy.

Voter goes in to vote.

They are given two random words. One for candidate A, one for candidate B.

They are told they should remember the code-word matching their choice if they later want to scan the printed out QR code (or enter their vote uuid) to one of the validator websites.

Voter makes their choice, completes the process. A thermal printout is printed with their vote uuid and a QR code meant to make it easy to input it.

Now anyone can get that printout with the uuid and scan it and see the code-word representing the voter's selection. However the association is only known to the voter and if asked, the voter can say that's what it was.

yes, this ^

never said it's easy, but it is possible.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/96589

page 35

Nice to read this.

I've been thinking for a while that it would be nice to have paper ballots with the ability to cryptographically verify the inclusion of your vote in totals all the way up (ballot collection box, polling location, district, city, county, state, nation).

Such a solution is of the sort where you can't make up your own opinion if the two (hopefully) experts that looked at it disagree. And if they happen to agree you still have to trust them because you'd have to train for several years to be able to follow their argument.

Doing this permit someone to force you to disclose your vote and force you to vote what they want. The strength of traditional vote is that nobody can know your vote and this is the more important feature of the voting system.

I was arguing about this with someone when they pointed out that in Australian Senate elections, it's trivially easy to make your vote unique. There are many candidates and you can order them however you like, so you can vote a particular way among the candidates that are actually competitive, and then order the rest of the candidates in some improbable way to make your vote unique. Then when the database gets published later someone can verify that you voted how you said you would.

So the Australian Senate is currently vulnerable to vote buying, for what it's worth.

Postal votes in our current system mean people can know your vote and force you to vote in a certain way.

Oh REALLY? Nobody can know? Then explain how this data exists:

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/us-voter-records-fr...

https://gizmodo.com/nearly-15-million-texas-voters-reportedl...

https://thestack.com/security/2016/04/25/93-4-million-mexica...

So much for such an important feature.

I like your thought, but if a voter can lookup their vote to confirm it got counted correctly with some form of receipt, then it opens the door for vote buying.

I’m not sure if there’s a way around that, but it would be awesome to be able to absolutely prove all votes were correctly counted.

that is why multiple people in the office of different political factions count the votes. And they are also present all the time. Otherwise you can simply do it the Russian way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oSeRyaFllY

I think what dnos means by vote buying, is not that somebody bribes the people who count the votes, but that somebody bribes the voters. If a politician now approaches me and promises me to pay me if I vote for him, he can't really be sure I actually did vote for him. Nobody but me knows what happens in the voting booth. He could ask me to take a picture, but I could still change my vote after the picture was taken.

sure .. that is possible. But all bribing is a matter of attenuation. One would want to spend as little money possible to change the outcome. Bribing voters is the most expensive version, one with the highest risk of being found out, and least verifiable. Paying off the people counting in each district is once removed in these risks. Attacking the people up the chain (that sum up many districts) is the next level etc.

At every step of this way, if there is software involved it becomes instantly easier and less risky to influence. Whether it is online voting, voting machines, vote counting software, tabulation software, emailing results upwards etc.

That doesn't solve the

> [...] my expert says your expert is wrong and so it is/isn't fraud.

This does not stop adding extra ballot counts

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