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Comment by avocado4 | Hacker News Reader

If we've managed to move the entire commerce and financial sector online we should be able to security digitize voting too with proper authn/z.

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They're not really comparable. If someone steals your banking info, the bank can use their funds to restore your money, and that also means they're incentivized to prevent fraud. What happens if something goes wrong during voting? Are the incentives of the people running the system aligned with voters' interests?

The big difference is with commerce and finance, we want to keep track of who moved what where. With voting, we deliberately want to keep votes secret, so no one can figure out who voted for which candidate, and only know the total votes each candidate got. To minimize coercion, we also want to make sure that a voter can only prove they voted, but not which candidate they voted for. These constraints make electronic voting at least an order of magnitude harder.

This seems like the perfect application for zk-snarks. (i.e. prove that a valid vote occurred, but not where the vote came from).

What you describe (secure anonymous voting with unique ID) can be implemented online as well.

One of the key components of voting is not being able to tell who voted for someone. That requirement doesn't exist in these other sectors that are online.

The ramifications of a single critical bug are way higher than in fintech. Who would you trust to write that code?

We haven't managed such a thing for commerce and finances, though. Elections have far more consequences than money moving, as well, so failures are much worse and less tolerated.

In NYC recently I did some ecommerce. I paid for 5 delivery meals and 4 of them were stolen by the drivers. Amazon is full of fraudulent products. Banks in the US are full of loopholes, like ACH not providing sufficient auth. Trust in commerce and finances online are low. Systems fail frequently, and "only money" is lost by big corps usually, so it's not considered a big deal to the general public. I would not use that as a model for elections.

We can either have a trustless, public (as it's happening), digital system or a private paper-based system, we can't have both.

I'm not sure electronic voting convenience is worth the privacy implications of having a full public ledger of who everyone voted for.

Exactly. And voting on paper to me seems hackable as well, just with different methodologies, such as Gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering is orthogonal - both paper and computer-based voting are vulnerable to gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering can exist with both systems. Voting machines have no benefits at all.

However, i-Voting does have the benefit of making it much harder to cause voter supression (assuming there's free ($) access to whatever provides access to voting).

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