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Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

Internet voting needs to be anonymous and non demonstrable.

Internet money needs to be the opposite, and reversible through the courts.

I think it is very difficult to secure internet voting, someone can stand behind you and twist your arm or otherwise coerce you to vote for their candidate. Much harder to do when there are observers and witnesses at the polling booth.

>Internet voting needs to be anonymous and non demonstrable

Why? Honestly Internet voting would improve overall turnout, which seems more important. And we probably could accomplish anonymity with some clever cryptography.

Anonymity keeps the government from locking you up if you vote the wrong way. Non-demonstrable keeps you from selling your vote to your boss.

That is why you typically show id, get a ballot and there is no relationship between the two.

I could still sell my vote to my boss in the typical system.

And we could use cryptography to vote anonymously after authentication online.

In the current system how do you sell your vote?

You go into the voting booth alone.

"I give you $50 if you vote for me, you'll get it when I win the ballot"

If someone is willing to sell their vote in the first place, they have zero incentive to vote for another candidate. They only have to trust the buyer to follow up on his promise (which is required in any other scenario also).

It can't be anonymous. There has to be some form of IDV to ensure it is a registered voter.

The ballot has to be anonymous, or unable to be tied back to the voter once cast. It’s a hard requirement for a variety of reasons

You have to trust the voting place/ballot receiver in all cases. Like, after they take your name, you need to make sure that they aren't secretly associating your name with the ballot you are filling in. Likewise, if you vote by mail, you need to make sure that they aren't associating your identity on the envelope with the anonymous ballot inside the envelope.

This is a solved problem for in-person voting with indentical ballots and self-depositing into sealed ballot boxes.

It is an unsolvable problem for mail in voting, which is why it should be prohibited in most cases.

It’s also a solved problem for mail in.

Double envelope systems, observable counting systems and standardized ballots that can checked for non uniqueness before voting are how they do it.

People have thought hard about this, and it has worked fine for may states for decades now.

That only solves the double-counting problem, and it's fundamentally impossible to solve the voter ID and voter manipulation problems with postal voting.

Except for older republicans and military members in almost all states?

I'm not American, so I don't understand the older republican comment, but except in exceptionally adverse circumstances (astronauts on the ISS or submariners, etc) the military can provide ballot boxes to it's personnel.

Military and overseas voters vote in their home state elections, even federally (all elections are held by states, even for federal candidates). You would need to ensure that there is a ballot box representing each state that has an eligible voter at a given site, and then need to figure out logistics for getting thousands of sealed boxes back to the vote counters in each state within the allotted deadline. You would also need to solve the issue of maintaining vote anonymity at low volumes.

Or, you could have a central, federally run organization that takes responsibility for delivering sealed ballots to the respective states in a timely manner. Which is what we call voting by mail.

> Or, you could have a central, federally run organization that takes responsibility for delivering sealed ballots to the respective states in a timely manner. Which is what we call voting by mail.

No, postal voting is not the same as bringing ballot boxes to voters in exceptional circumstances and does not have the same set of tradeoffs. Postal voting in particular certainly does not solve the voter manipulation problem.

The fact that so many other countries manage to actually provide ballot boxes to all voters, even to voters in much more remote scenarios than US military service and countries with far fewer resources means that the US has no excuses.

They use mail in ballots. Older people who are seen as having trouble reaching the polls can also vote by mail in most states. American conservatives don't see these as problems because these mail-in votes are generally in their favor.

Please do yourself a favor and volunteer at a voting location. These are essentially solved issues, and you seem completely unaware of that fact.

I live in a vote by mail state (like most of the west), I know exactly how it’s done.

The vote needs to be anonymous, not the registration + checkin process.

When digital content can be duplicated with ease, it is difficult to guarantee verified voter but untraceable vote.

Indeed, many people now get a erroneous covid tax-relief refund bill for not qualifying for a program they never signed up for in the first place.

One local scammer made off with a $5m government refund for a fraudulent business tax filing. You can't make this stuff up if you tried...

At some point, one is just amazed at the size of the cons people pull online. =3

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