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Comment by LandoCalrissian | Hacker News Reader

The short answer is you can buy votes then. If you can prove to me who you voted for, I'll give you $5 or whatever.

Which is trivially easy with the availability of camera-phones (just include your ID in the shot).

I know it's not foolproof as you could request a new ballot, but I'm guessing those buying votes aren't the smartest folk. Plus you'd be crazy to not accept the money upfront, as there's no way they're actually going to pay out after the fact and it's not like you can take someone to court for not upholding their end of an illegal bargain.

What you're buying isn't a vote, but a receipt. What if we could increase the supply of valid receipts enough to make them effectively worthless?

For example, voting machines could drop duplicate receipts into a bucket that voters are free to rummage around in.

Or just not have receipts and avoid the issue altogether.

Sure, but there's a benefit to receipts: you can verify that your vote was counted correctly.

Well, you can verify that the receipt says your vote was counted correctly. That assumes you both trust the receipt system and believe that whatever tampering was done to cause your Obama vote to become a Romney vote couldn't have possibly also resulted in the receipt providing incorrect information as well.

Ideally, I think the complete list of votes (with receipt confirmation numbers, but no names, obviously) would be available for inspection.

How would you tell the difference between a valid and invalid receipt when the voter came to verify it?

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