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Comment by gloosx | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think the biggest flaw in any online voting system is that a network-connected computing device cannot be trusted by any party. Email inbox can not be trusted or verified. Such a simplistic online voting would never stand a chance against malicious actors who are somewhat more sophisticated and creative.

The future of paper voting can be something like a quick fingertip-actuated DNA sequencer which will imprint your DNA hash right into the paper ballot, but it will never be an effective system on top of the current network architecture. You have to show up personally to vote. Like can you imagine voting with SMS or something? This is complete non-sense.

However I think this tool would work pretty good on a smaller community scale.

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In practice, I think that there are a number of fairly high quality voting systems available. A key part of that is maintaining a secret ballot.

1. Widespread voting in person at a number of distributed sites, with paper ballots and either hand counting or machine counting with risk limiting audits. This is pretty technologically trivial to implement, but requires manpower.

2. Widespread postal voting as it's done in places like Oregon, where there's a non-serialised ballot inside a serialised envelope. All voters are sent an envelope and ballot via postal mail, and the return can be done at either a drop box or through the postal system. On election day, all valid envelopes are opened and emptied under the watchful eyes of observers from each party. They are then counted by hand or with machines and risk limiting audits.

What should not exist are voting machines. There should always be a paper ballot in the process somewhere that is human readable.

> The future of paper voting can be something like a quick fingertip-actuated DNA sequencer which will imprint your DNA hash right into the paper ballot,

This would mean the end to the secret vote.

Why so? It would calculate the hash, and to reverse it back to the original DNA is an irrationally expensive computation. On top of that, voter simply putting a random seed phrase for doing another 650000 pbkdf2 iterations would take this task to close to level impossible – at the same time the ballot itself will remain verifiable by the original voter.

The thing about secret voting is that you want to make it impossible to verify that a particular person voted for a particular party. Otherwise it becomes possible to threaten people with violence if they don't show confirmation that they voted for the correct party, it also becomes possible to pay people $1000 if they can show confirmation of voting for the other party, people may start using the confirmation as a social thing to proudly prove which side they're on, etc.

Why would you ever want to make it impossible to verify that your vote really went for a particular party, you should just trust it blindly or what? It should be completely opposite of that in my opinion. It is impossible to prevent people from showing confirmation of voting for another party, since they are alone in the booth and they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof. Paying 1000$ for voting is a problem for tax institution not the election. There will always be a way to reimburse anyone for voting, but it comes with a risk since it is unlawful. In a true direct democracy system all votes are public, and looking at the wealth and wellbeing of countries which adopted such a system – I firmly believe it is a better one.

Why? It's the norm in pretty much every country when it comes to making decisions at the national level. If secret voting is not ensured and there's a standard way to verify anybody's vote with 100% certainty, there will be employers firing people for voting for a particular candidate, there will be discounts/freebies for people who voted for a particular candidate, there will be violence and ostracism, celebrities and company executives will be harassed to justify their voting decisions, and all of this WILL pressure everyone's voting decisions (or the decision to not vote, to try to avoid being politicized), so it's not just a problem for the tax institution or police, it becomes a problem of elections fundamentally no longer being free or fair. For this reason we have the secret ballot, and documented election processes to ensure they can overall be trusted despite individual votes being kept secret.

"they can write any confirmation code they want on a ballot and take a photo proof"

Apart from the fact some jurisdictions (such as UK) will discard your vote for writing codes on the ballot, there are a million ways to photoshop or fake a ballot selfie some other way, there's no standard way to be 100% certain how anybody voted.

Fun fact, you don't even need to write anything on the ballot if you are in the UK, since every one of these has a unique number already, and every voter has a number which is printed down on the counterfoil of the ballot paper automatically. Secrecy of the ballot is not guaranteed in the UK, as officials do have access to the counterfoil and can determine how individual electors have voted. Even some US states require the ability to link ballots to voters, and it doesn't make these elections fundamentally non-free or unfair. People are fundamentally non-free to this day, nor will be free any elections they participate in, as long pseudo ballot secrecy is required to protect them from violence and graft and as long as they have no comtetence, knowledge and confidence in expressing and discussing their political decisions publicly.

I think there is a niche for electronic voting for low impact decision making. Used as such it could actually make societies more democratic.

Elections that have the potential to shift the power structure of a state are not low impact decisions. Paper ballots being slow and labour intensive is a feature, not a bug for really high stake decisions like who is in charge of a nuclear arsenal for the next years.

The more I know about electronics and programming the worse I think the idea of E-voting is for such occasions.

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