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Comment by rubendev | Hacker News Reader

I think the main problem with this is that you can be paid/coerced to vote for someone and be able to easily prove that you voted for the person they wanted. It’s easier to vote for the person you actually wanted to vote for, and maintain plausible deniability, if you go in person to a voting booth.

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Could this be mitigated by allowing voters to vote multiple times and receive multiple confirmations, but only count the last vote for each person? That way an individual could prove that they voted a certain way to a third party, but there would be no way for the third party to know whether it was their final vote. Meanwhile the individual knows that they spoiled their previous vote or votes and that their final vote is included.

You’d have the same issue as you’d need to be able to verify that your last vote was being counted, for displaying your vote back to you to have any value.

A scheme to be able to show coercive parties fake votes would be known to them immediately.

This wouldn't solve anything. The person doing the coercion would be able to store the hash and double check after the election if the vote was still the way they wanted.

the question is, what's the worst situation for society.

People not trusting the votes being counted properly or people being coerced paid to vote some way and this making it more valuable.

A plausible solution would be to significantly delay the distribution of the record. i.e. if every election was only printed out 2-4 years after the fact, it could give people confidence that the votes are being counted properly (as otherwise they would be found out eventually), but significantly reduce the incentive for the bad behavior (if one things this actually significantly incentivizes it) because it will be a long time before they can validate if what they were given is true.

I don't take this concern seriously.

You can be paid/coerced to vote for someone even if there's total secrecy. For example, you can take your cellphone in and take a picture of your filled out ballot to collect a payment.

Unless you want to start the confiscation of cellphones before voting in person, the risk of a coerced or bought vote will always exist.

In Argentina at least, you can get a fine[1] for taking a picture of your ballot. Certainly a hard law to enforce though.

[1]https://www.perfil.com/noticias/politica/elecciones-2025-de-...

In Texas, the election judges are supposed to stop you if you pull out a cellphone or any device. Paper is all you are allowed to use during the voting process.

In-person, high-risk rule-breaking that's hard to validate has a tendency to scale differently from say, pasting a value into a lottery/payment app.

I mean, compare the number of people who've flown over Barbara Streisand's property to take a picture of her house to the number of people who had a copy of said picture in their browser cache.

You can read more about this peculiar scaling factor of the internet in Bill Gates 1995 book The Road Ahead.

> For example, you can take your cellphone in and take a picture of your filled out ballot to collect a payment.

And then you can go up to the election workers and tell them you have a spoiled ballot and want a new one, which they have to give you. That's one reason such schemes don't work right now.

Source: I volunteer as an election worker every year in Iowa.

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