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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

It's MUCH more difficult than banking or taxes. Not only must your vote be secure and counted; it must be anonymous! Not even you should be able to prove to anyone else who you voted for and there must be no audit trail that could tie an individual vote to a person.

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Doesn't bitcoin solve this problem?

No, bitcoin is "pseudonymous", transactions are public. It's not necessarily easily linked to your real identity (hence the pseudonymity), but with today's profiling tech, is that any guarantee?

No, bitcoin has an unencrypted audit trail.

Good luck issuing every voter with a keypair safely.

I vote by mail as required by my state. I could show anyone my ballot after filling it out but before mailing it.

Sure, you could get a dozen ballots and convince every candidate they owe you a bribe -- so long as you only mail one in!

That's the ideal, but in reality even normal pencil voting can be hacked since it is pretty simple to take a picture of your ballot with a smartphone. Then you can prove whom you voted for.

How would a picture of a ballot prove that it was your ballot, that the picture hadn't been doctored, and that the ballot hadn't been doctored?

I don't think that's very salient. You could raise analogous objections for Internet-based voting weaknesses, or most information leaks in general.

Only if the Internet-voting based system is very carefully designed. It's rather difficult to verify that your vote was counting in a way that doesn't also prove who you voted for.

There are some papers describing systems to do this that seems like they could work. But they're pretty complex.

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