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Comment by mshook | Hacker News Reader

Here it's almost impossible to slip an anonymous ballot.

The ballot box is made of transparent plastic (something like [1]), and you don't slide the envelope in it yourself. The slot is blocked until an official pulls a lever to let it go through.

So you put the envelope by the slot, if you keep holding it you will be asked you to let it go (so you can't cleverly hold multiple of them while it looks like one). They'll check again who you are and if you can actually vote and so on. If all is good, an official will pull the lever.

[1] https://www.jpg.fr/content/images/product/09812-00J_1_xnl.jp...

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That's not the end of the process. At some point, the ballots are coming out of the box. Slip your extras in after that.

You can't do that either because the way it works here is you're being given a sealed bag with all envelopes coming straight for the ballot boxes and that process was supervised by multiple persons.

And then you have:

- one person who opens the envelope containing the ballot and unfolds it

- one who reads out loud the ballot

- at least two who write down what the person above said

And all that is supervised by the same people who were manning the polling station (at least 4 them).

So if you have multiple ballots in the same envelope, they will call it. The only way it'd work is if they all worked together. And you'd have to do that for a couple counting stations in many given polling stations... That sounds like an inside job you couldn't keep secret for long.

Because one thing I forgot to mention: counting is done at the polling station, it's not centralized, only results are.

Again, this sounds like something that happens before the theoretical audit. An audit by definition happens after the results are reported. It is a process meant to double-check that the original process, which you describe above, gave an accurate result.

If you stake everything you have on the original process being incorruptible, then your only response to an audit that shows a discrepancy must be "the audit is wrong". That's unlikely to satisfy many people; if that is your only strategy for dealing with audits, you are running an inauditable process.

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