That seems like it'd be impossible to implement. Either I'd have a record that I voted with no way to confirm who my vote was counted for, or I'd be able to prove that I voted for a specific candidate which opens a Pandora's box of problems (either coercion for voting for the wrong candidate or bribes for provably voting for a specific candidate).
I mean sure, if someone can come up with a workable blockchain-based system that would be good, but I don't think that is an in-practice option on the table right now.
First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others
But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown. The same people who say you don’t need an ID to vote because it’s a non-issue then come up with fantasy scenarios of masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or bribed to do it LOL.
> masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or bribed to do it LOL
Would you believe that in some households, the husband considers his wife's vote as his property? And that there are lots of households like this?
It doesn't have to be a singular mass of people being coerced by a single entity. Lots of wives being coerced by lots of husbands is also corrosive to elections.
I don't know if there's a lot of bribery risk, but a family member asking to see how you voted has plenty of room for coercion and abuse. It seems good that no one but you can know how you voted in principle.
> First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others
I doubt it, and I suspect if you try to point at a specific system to implement you will find that that none exist even in theory. I can verify I voted with zero knowledge, yes. But I can't verify who I voted for. So I can put candidate A into the machine, it switches to candidate B and we can all prove I voted in the election.
Conversely, if I can prove who I voted for then the scheme is vulnerable to the well known after-election issues because I can prove it to others. If I can only prove something with plausible deniability note that I probably can't tell if the machine switched my vote around. There might be something that can be done in the space, but it is a tricky one to resolve.
> But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.
If you check you may well find it in a reasonable-worse-case scenario it is a matter of life-and-death. I think maybe literally zero government electoral systems make the voter's vote public (ie, we have near universal secret ballots [0])? There is a reason for that. If we wanted people to sign their name on the vote slip that'd be great for auditing - but we don't because that would set the system up for some really horrible failures. The one that leaps to mind is "if you don't vote for me and I get in, I will do [insert blank] to you" strategies.
In most US states I can get a voter’s database and “party affiliation”. I was shocked that thus info is publicly available, and all the people’s addresses and driver’s license info are also stored there (and can be leaked)
The “party affiliation” is a very good (around 95%) proxy to how they’re going to vote when they show up, as long as the two-party system dominates, which is why I say the whole “ability to prove your vote” thing is overblown, since your party affiliation at registration is already known, even publicly:
If everyone got a unique prime number and a running total vote product was available, I always thought this would be a neat solution. Still susceptible to the goon-with-a-wrench technique I think
That doesn't sound like it secures anything. I can't verify that my prime number is unique (I vote for A. There is already a vote for A at 3. The machine logs a vote for B at 5 and reports to me my number is 3). So it'd be a scheme where nothing can be proved to me that I didn't already know. I still have to trust all the same middlemen, and I don't gain any knowledge about the integrity of an election.
That is an unreasonable assumption, there isn't a secure way to issue everyone with a guaranteed unique prime. And even if there was, what is this system supposed to be doing? It doesn't secure anything and it doesn't enable any new knowledge that wasn't already available by just signing ballots with your name (which is a bad idea, so by comparison we might expect that this prime scheme is also a bad idea). Are you sure that is an interesting thread to pull? It doesn't look at all promising to me.
It is absolutely 100% not overblown. Voter punishment and suppression is a well established practice in many places. India's vote tallies for example have evolved to a pretty complicated system, because local powers were even instituting collective punishment on whole villages if they voted "badly". So, the vote counting system had to be adjusted to extend vote secrecy not just to the personal vote, but even to entire counties.
This is a very real problem with a well known history. Even in the USA, gerrymandering is facilitated by this kind of information. If votes were mixed during counting so that you didn't have information about vote counts in each polling place, it would have been considerably harder to come up with the crazy districts being used today in many places. Having personal identification of each voter would definitely have creative uses as well.
And as for bribing, in this very election we have Elon Musk publicly announcing he's giving out money to people who essentially pledge to vote (with some attempts at plausible deniability for committing this federal crime). I'm sure smaller and less loud election influencing is being attempted all the time - but it's hard to do if people can outright scam you and vote differently than what you paid them. Having an online proof of your vote would open up the floodgates to this at a massive scale. And there are plenty of people poor enough to see this as a lifeline.
People who want voter ID are wrong because they ignore the racist history of using voter ID requirements to disenfranchise voters and/or don’t understand how voter registration or ballot tracking work.
Voter ID is simply not something that will add security to the voting process but it will disenfranchise voters.
ID is already verified when registering and names are recorded when submitting ballots. Anyone seeking to cast ballots in the name of registered non-voters would need an army of individuals that won’t be recognized by poll workers and perfect knowledge of who is registered and not voting.
If a single registered voter name tries to cast two ballots that will trigger an investigation that will unravel the conspiracy. It doesn’t scale. It’s a problem made up by people who want to disenfranchise voters and is eaten up because it sounds “common sense”.
People who don’t think anonymity in voting is important lack imagination and historical knowledge. Fear of retaliation from the government, political fanatics, your family, or friends is perfectly rational and is why voting must be anonymous. This is an especially reasonable concern in an election where one of the candidates refers to voters as “the enemy within”. Consider voting for a Communist when Senator McCarthy was on his witch hunts. People are right to be scared of retaliation.
I’m not calling voter ID racist. I’m saying that in the United States it has an established history of being abused by racists to suppress minority votes. This is a verifiable fact. Look at the Voting Rights Act for proof.
> You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approach isn’t very helpful or productive.
I mean sure, if someone can come up with a workable blockchain-based system that would be good, but I don't think that is an in-practice option on the table right now.