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Comment by asabjorn | Hacker News Reader

Simple solution: each voter is given a receipt of their choices and a unique signature for it, and an online website where they can check that their signature was taken into account in the final tally.

With that a fraudsters model have to deal with random checks by any voter.

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This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.

It's absolutely imperative that after you leave the ballot box, noone has the ability to verify what your particular vote was, and you don't have the ability to prove to someone else that you really voted that way, or that ability will be abused on scale, by local "influencers", employers, etc requiring the people to demonstrate that they voted "correctly". The mixing up of ballots in the ballot box is a very important feature for the elections.

Or is it? It seems to me simply outlawing both asking and disclosing would deter these problems well enough.

It would be pretty hard to stop. Many elections come down to under 50k votes, which will lead to either candidates or their supporters buying votes for cash (with 30% of voters not even bothering to vote, $10 a vote would probably be plenty to entice people), or each side finding a handful of cases where this did happen and claiming it happened on a larger scale. It would call the whole election into doubt.

Those things are already generally felonies, however, it's not that good deterrant, because it's something that's hard to prove, and they're used in situations where the vulnerable party would have to openly challenge it to report it. I mean, these are not theoretical considerations, all these things have a historical background on how election manipulations have been attempted and implemented worldwide over the centuries. Underneath pretty much every tiny detail in the ballot process there's some particular exploit that has happened and been prevented in future by that detail.

> This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.

Not at all; the parent said "taken into account in the final tally", not "see that their vote was counted as they intended".

This is very similar to the system for paper ballots, with a tear-off receipt. If you type in the ID number, you can verify that that ballot was counted. There is no association between identity, vote choice, or ballot ID.

Other than the fact that you _did_ vote, I think?

I feel like if you can't verify your own vote was marked down correctly, and the overall data is not publicly auditable, then it is impossible to trust the election process...

In the traditional paper ballot process you can observe and verify that all the votes there are recorded correctly, you just can't tell which one of these was yours, they're indistinguishable. (The local practice is that if you mark your ballot to be distinguishable - e.g. that the observers could record that Bob voted that way - that invalidates it).

And it's not just a theoretical possibility to observe - I don't know how USA does it, but for my area the counting at each district is generally observed by multiple people, including (but not limited to) the representatives of all serious parties.

You say that, but this still relies on trust of the institution. If you can't verify that your recorded vote matches what you put in, how can you trust it? All the ballots could've been switched out, or something. You are choosing to trust the institution.

Everyone has different levels of trust, and I'm sure generally the chance of some grand voting conspiracy is very low; however, for me to fully trust the system I would need to be able to verify the count myself, and verify that my own vote was recorded correctly.

Personally this feels more important than some issue around buying votes etc. That is mostly illegal, and plenty of people find ways to indirectly achieve the same effect anyway...

This is a non-starter because it allows vote selling and coercion.

How were you planning for the voter to check that the final tally actually takes their vote into account and doesn't include other imaginary votes?

Are you going to rely on the same system or perhaps another equally compromised system to "randomly" select votes for you to check and how do you propose to check them if you don't know how the person voted?

I would go so far to say that there exists mathematically no solution to this problem that doesn't violate voter anonymity.

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