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Comment by unclebucknasty | Hacker News Reader

Good. I never understood a rationale for not having a paper trail.

I am from Brazil, our current president been trying for years to introduce a paper trail, but the congress politicians (of all parties mind you, it is not a partisan thing) and the election judges are happy to find more and more reasons to block the effort.

Meanwhile the few politicians that DID attempt to do go along with this effort... died. Maybe they "died", who knows.

I bet they "died" died.

it's a tasty option when done perfectly, in a perfect world, in a vacuum and the voters are perfectly spherical cows.

Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers physically sucks.

Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

It is possible to have paper ballots that can be counted by machine for fast results, but that can also be published afterwards so that anybody can check the count, and that allow individual voters to check to see if their vote was counted correctly (but not to prove to someone else how they voted--this is called coercion-resistance), using "fill in the bubble" ballots that can be counted by widely available inexpensive optical scanner with the only new equipment needed at the polling place being special pens for marking the ballots, with all the cryptographic magic that that allows the verifiability and public counting being in the ballots themselves and put their when they are printed. For voters that aren't interested in verifying later that their own vote was correctly counted, they can ignore all that and it appears just like a regular "fill in the bubbles" process that many places have used for decades.

Here's a paper with details in PDF form [1], and here it is in HTML [2]. Here's a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3]. Here's a Wikipedia article [4] on it.

Voting systems with these kind of verification/auditing capabilities are called "end-to-end auditable" or "end-to-end voter verifiable" systems, and here is some information on them in general [5].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

>> Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

Maybe in the US, a lot of places do it just fine so.

Assuming your a member of a union

Before election

Union boss: "we expect everyone to vote for candidate X"

After election

Union boss: "show me your vote receipt"

This is such a bad example that strikes me as contrived just to take a dig at unions. Why not replace: /Union boss/Employer/, it still works.

The receipt is kept with the machine. I’ve never been anywhere where they give you proof of who YOU voted for.

I don't know the scheme used, but _you_ also need to be able to verify that the vote was counted correctly in this situation. So make sure you read the receipt.

It's better than what we have. Vote-changing can be uncovered by an audit. ... But I still prefer the coercion-resistant systems that let you verify your own vote was counted correctly after the fact. Someone else posted a link to a bunch of papers.

As several people have commented, many systems print the receipt, which you then hand in to be counted. That’s the way my state does it, too. So you can see who your vote is being cast for.

In CA when you vote, there's a tracking mechanism you can use to see your vote was counted. A few years back I remember the ballots had a receipt you could tear off and use to verify it online later.

What would be cool is if you combined that serial number with a hash generated by filling in the ballot after the fact.

Eg you go to a page, supply your serial number and the things you voted for, and it tells you if it was counted and matches what you're saying.

Of course, this could still be used that way... but in CA ballots usually have enough options that it would be difficult for a malicious actor to have that much intent haha.

Most people would probably forget which smaller issues they voted for though.... so I dunno if it'd be reliable.

This is a weird caricature of how a union works. Unions protect workers from being fired by their employers so I’m not sure what a union “boss” could do to someone who upset them.

No, it’s an accurate representation of how many unions operated in the mid 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa

It happens now and has happened in recent times among all types of employers. The historical and union specific example wasn't necessary.

Companies can strongly suggest who employees should vote for and solicit donations to specific candidates.

As far as checking a record of actual votes, that's old days Tammany Hall kind of stuff. Not to say it wouldn't happen again if people could easily get away with it.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/in-house/can-a-company-te...

FWIW, the union example may be relevant because it's actually the origin of the anti-voter-interference laws in most states. Pennsylvania specifically is rooted in precisely the scenario up-thread described due to the heavy-industry history of the state.

It is good that these laws continue to protect the voter's right to autonomy against new threats to it.

Searching "vot" brings up one hit on that page, about a union election. Searching "elect" has several hits, none of which have to do with fraud. What part of that Wikipedia page shows unions operating like that?

That's not a page on union voting practices but on Jimmy Hoffa, the well known union boss who was also a well known criminal.

So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.

> So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.

Since you are asking me, If you read or scan the page you will see how unions historically operated in the US.

It would be really bad if the voter got to keep the receipt, or even had the chance to image it.

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