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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>That's a bug, not a feature

It's a trade off. I want to be able to prove that my vote was counted. How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system?

>as nobody else can verify what you voted for.

You can mitigate this problem by giving people a way to fake any vote outcome. The voter knows how to verify their actual vote, but someone else would not be sure if what they verified was real or fake. Also I doubt this type of buying votes with verification is that big of an actual thing. You can trivially do it with paper voting to by just asking them to stream themself voting or by taking a picture of their ballot.

>You either have to blindly trust the system

Having someone else count votes without the ability for you yourself to count votes and check to see if your vote was included is the opposite of blindly trusting the system.

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> Also I doubt this type of buying votes with verification is that big of an actual thing. You can trivially do it with paper voting to by just asking them to stream themself voting or by taking a picture of their ballot.

It's not so much selling votes, as to discourage voter intimidation: The husband forces his wife, the boss forces his subordinates, the local mafia forces their victims to vote a particular way.

I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority.

Someone might still privately take that picture of their ballot paper, after all there's a private voting booth; the officials wouldn't know. You're allowed to say you made a mistake and ask for a replacement ballot paper, so you could show your boss the version they want to see, and then vote differently.

> I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority.

Except we allow postal voting pretty much willy nilly, especailly in areas where intimidation can happen

That's due to a trade-off of requirements, to maximise free and fair representation.

Lack of postal votes makes the ballot less fair and representative, because it affects people with systematic bias in relevant sub-populations (wealth, working conditions, age, health, etc) and areas.

In areas where intimidation can happen... for going to the polling station. (All the intimidator has to do is post menacing guards, soldiers, etc. outside the station or on the routes to it. There are plenty of news reports of this happening in some countries. I'm not aware of this in the UK though.)

So the question is whether you get a more fair and representative vote outcome by allowing postal voting, or by disallowing it.

The balance of trade-offs has led to UK policy allowing postal votes, encouraging each individual to fill out and seal their vote in private, and use statistical and other investigation methods to look for signs of fraud, while maintaining a high standard of secret ballots when voting in person.

That might not be the balance that works best in other countries. In the UK it is said by the Electoral Commission that there is no evidence that postal voting has changed electoral outcomes to date, but some attempts at large scale fraud were discovered and prevented.

I canvas in a rural ward, about half of voters are postal voters, many have adult children living with parents, and where one is postal, usually all are postal.

It's quite easy to see how a secret ballot can be not secret if the (typically patriarch) says "lets fill the forms out together and I'll take them all in"

I don't know how it's done in the USA, but in Germany voting by post has to be carried out before the day of the election. The actual postal votes are stored and only opened on the day of the election. After somebody send in their postal vote they can go to the public voting office and declare to invalidate their postal vote. The people counting the postal votes will get a list with invalidated votes and remove these envelopes before the votes are opened. The person who invalidated can then either do another postal vote or vote at the ballot box.

So in Germany postal voting is secured against selling votes.

If there is a way to invalidate a vote in the UK, I'm not aware of it, and as someone who's actively stood for election I've got a greater awareness of the average voter, and 50% of people have less awareness than the average voter.

It's not about selling, which would be easy to detect like all large conspiracies. It's about subtle coercion that postal voting can enable.

> How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system?

Most vote countings are public. I can go to my polling place, cast my vote, check that nobody tampers with the box, watch how they count every vote correctly, ensure that the written tallies are correct, and then verify that the central system tallies match with those I counted.

Great, ZKProofs present the possibility for everyone to do better than that with much less work.

With paper voting you can see that there are real people casting votes. With electronic voting it is trivial to add fictious voters and vote for them, especially in countries where voter lists are not published.

Less work isn't the optimisation goal, though. Reliability, trust, verifiability, secret ballot, etc. is what it is about. If things can be made more efficient without sacrificing the primary goals ok, but if I as a citizen can't verify the results anymore (by watching the count etc.) the purpose isn't met.

It seems like you don’t and don’t care to, understand.

Tell that to the people who now, instead of just going to a polling place and placing a paper on an envelope, have to download and store digital certificates, possibly download and install new programs and deal with the troubles of all that, just so "verifying votes" is slightly easier for the minority of people with the knowledge of the system and ZK proofs.

Also, you're assuming the system is perfectly implemented. In reality, such a system will be complex, will have many more pieces than the ZK system itself (and those pieces will have vulnerabilities), and will require users to do more which will also be prone to errors and vulnerabilities.

I don't understand the insistence on electronic voting for elections. It's less transparent to laypeople, offers small benefits and adds significant complexity both in the implementation and use.

Many in the US think that "they" are lying to us about basic physics so do you think they will accept those proofs?

Paper ballots requiring a lot of work is the whole point. This makes tampering at scale a lot more difficult and a lot easier to detect.

The problem is that it solves a problem that nobody actually has and provides tinder to make a problem that actually exists worse.

Political machines exploiting nursing homes, pushing absentee ballots on the elderly, etc are already problematic, and allowing field GOTV teams to collect this type of data in mass is would make expanding these operations in size and scope.

You’d also create the new problem of hyper-partisan people crying about voter fraud. You’ll have a bunch of lunatics running around with fake ballot receipts to push whatever narrative they are trying to push.

In my state, it’s illegal to take pictures of ballots at the poll, and there are bipartisan poll inspectors that will shut that down if it happens.

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