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My point is not that paper never hurts. My point is that paper is the absolute minimum. The security requirements of a voting system are radically different than most systems.

A good summary of the problems and how to solve them is here:

https://www.verifiedvoting.org/




My absolutely minimum is that every citizen should be able to confirm how their vote was recorded after the fact.

If we can't do that, then no system can guarantee us anything. If we can do that, then the system doesn't matter.

I'm familiar with VV. I completely agree with their position that post-election audits are critical to ensuring trust in the system. (That's a weaker version of my own requirement above.)

However, their latest policy recommendation was that we must keep hand-marked ballots, which is just bizarre to me. That's the sort of policy you endorse if you want elections to be decided by teams of lawyers debating stray marks and creative misspellings to deduce voter intent. It's a good way to let money break ties in elections, and makes me question VV's impartiality or judgment on these issues.

They have repeatedly linked to outside teams of researchers covering end-to-end verifiable systems though. A thorough read of the research notes that while there are a number of challenges to overcome, end-to-end verifiable could provide a path to secure elections.


> My absolutely minimum is that every citizen should be able to confirm how their vote was recorded after the fact.

The downside of that is that such systems generally enable bought votes and extorted votes.


This takes us back to my first comment.

> Vote selling could be an issue with either paper receipts or my protocol above. The best solution for either is probably outside the system (criminal penalties and significant whistle-blower rewards). You might be able to add deniability to the toy protocol above, but things would get complicated.

Extortion and bribery work against individuals some of the time, but using it against large groups of people hoping not even one of them will alert reporters or police?

Not to mention, this is a flaw in the current voting system, because people can easily sneak phones into booths to take video of their votes.

Being able to confirm that your specific vote was counted should be considered a basic human right. If you look at it that way, it feels strange to deny people a basic right to protect against some harm we don't currently address now, but could easily address in other ways.


> Being able to confirm that your specific vote was counted should be considered a basic human right.

No, not if that means that many people cannot safely vote. At one time it was considered a right in many jurisdictions that everyone could know what everyone else's vote was, and votes were public. This enabled the local landlords to ensure that bad things happened to people who didn't vote the "right" way. Many vote-confirmation systems allow others to verify the vote as well, and the historical record makes it clear that this can be very dangerous.

Currently we can't even verify that votes are counted correctly at all. We currently allow people to press buttons and then have an unverifiable machine report what its owners want the vote to be, without any reasonable way to verify it.

It's great to want much more, but let's start with the basics. Having a way to verify that the counted vote is the actual vote is that basic.




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