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Comment by Errsher | Hacker News Reader

You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately.

Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction:

https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard

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Ah yes, the average citizen will definitely trust that "homomorphic encryption" isn't just some nonsense made up so the election can be rigged.

I’d wager money that “homomorphic” gets interpreted as “gay power rangers” by easily 30% of the voting public in the United States.

The difference is that with something like ElectionGuard - as long as the encrypted result is publicly available - you would remove an entire class of complaints that people have with the current system - individuals would be able to validate that their personal vote was counted appropriately, and you would be able to audit the authenticity of every vote without disclosing/revealing who individuals vote for. Unlike the current system which allows opportunity for fraud and is not always auditable (at least not immediately), the actual voting infrastructure and procedures do not matter as much if we can independently verify the authenticity of the _outcome_.

Many of the people who believe in election fraud do so because the leader of their tribe said there's election fraud and social psychology leads people to tend to believe the things that the leader of their tribe says. This is a human condition issue, not an evidentiary issue.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why so many people don't trust this election, and it has nothing to do with the technology. They don't trust it because the loser of the election has made up baseless claims of fraud - so that he can continue to line his pockets with his supporters' donations. And those supporters are in far too deep now to accept that they've been hoodwinked for so many years.

Giving up secret ballots has its own issues. Always worth considering, but giving people a way to verify their own vote could lead to vote buying: "vote for X, keep your mouth shut, and show me the verification for $$$".

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