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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>Voters should not be able to prove to anyone else how they voted – the technical term is “receipt-free” – otherwise an attacker could build an automated system of mass vote-buying via the internet. But receipt-free E2E-VIV systems are complicated and counterintuitive for people to use.

This can easily solved be done via letting people forge receipts. Then anyone can forge a vote to give to someone offering to buy them.

The receipt is in fact the best part of such systems as with paper voting it is impossible to verify if your ballot was counted or if it got "lost."

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> This can easily solved be done via letting people forge receipts. Then anyone can forge a vote to give to someone offering to buy them.

This is the literal definition of receipt freeness. It’s hard to ensure that the receipt you receive to verify your vote had not already been forged by the malware.

Then that is a confusing definition since the voter literally had a receipt of their vote that they can verify.

If the receipt you get says you voted for someone you didn't, then that is a clear sign something went wrong.

The definition is fine. It covers paper ballot security requirement where one shall not get any receipt at all.

I'm not sure if there's a way to make forging work.

You can't forge a new ballot, because ballot IDs are necessarily public, and are cryptographically tied to a voter ID in order to ensure votes are valid and that everybody only votes once.

But it seems like nothing is stopping you from looking up ballots at random until you find the votes you want, and then claiming that was your vote. And if someone else got paid for the same one, then claim they're the one lying, not you?

You don't forge a ballot. You are forging the proof of your vote.

then it's not a proof of who you voted for

You would know which would be the real one and which you forged. Obviously when checking that your vote was properly counted you wouldn't use a forged one.

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