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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that using paper ballots mean that you never can make sure your vote was counted accurately and you have thousands of people on extreme sides of both political spectrums capable of interfering with your vote in some way.

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We have well understood systems to mitigate risk of election tampeting with paper ballots. Not perfect, but enough i trust it.

I think any reasonable system would include both. Paper backups + digital efficiency seems like the way to do it. Maybe paper backups + blockchain digital solutions would be preferable.

At which point why bother with the blockchain?

I think the point of blockchain is that it's more traceable and secure than other open options. I would think of it less as a crypto-currency and more of a merkle tree like git. Voting blockchain solutions won't be decentralized. It's just a useful protocol with some benefits.

Which is not what you want in a secret ballot election. Ballot secrecy is an important safeguard to prevent coercion and vote buying.

There are protocol choices that still enable secret voting like monero for example.

You can watch people open the envelopes and count the votes.

Can you guarantee the supply chain, and the people watching every vote?

Yes?

Just livestream the whole process.

Mail in voting? Early voting last for up to 2 months. That doesn't scale to 100M votes

By "using paper ballots" I understood it to be in-person, voting by mail has a lot of issues indeed.

Usually in person voting is done through a machine. Where as vote by mail is a paper ballet

Only in the united states (where i am not from). Normally i think of paper ballots as the hand counted sort.

However as long as tge machine is just a scanner (still paper trail) much of the same argument spplies.

That sounds ridiculous but I'm sure it works this way in the US. If you can have the worst of both worlds why not make it so.

Or just stand there. Where I'm from, representatives from each party and members of the public will be present the whole day.

Yes? In Australia every candidate can appoint scrutineers to watch votes being counted.

How do you trust all of them?

You only need to trust one of them, or trust that they would not all conspire to steal the election the same way. Not too hard, compared to a piece of software that has a much less reliable supply chain.

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