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Very good point Spoom. I wonder which is worse: adversaries or corrupt organizations, or corrupt election officials / a tyrannic government.

I think it depends on the ability you have to defend yourself against either, either as an individual or as a society.



Confirmable votes happily wins you the worst of both worlds, and so can be dismissed easily.


Besides, we already have quite good protocols to ensure verifiability of votes: Put what you voted for on a piece of paper, and drop it in an urn. Allow observers to follow the urns everywhere, and observers from all parties to be present and take part in counting.

It's so effective that the first thing people do when they want to rig votes is to try to take away the paper and/or the observers, sometimes with threats of violence.

If people want quick results, while retaining the benefits of paper ballots with a proven provenance, we have the easy solution: Electronic voting where the machine prints out what you vote for, and ask the voter to confirm what was printed is what they voted on, and have the voter put that printed receipt in an urn like before. Then you can have near instant results from the machines, and can still more slowly verify a sufficiently large random sample of urns of paper receipts to ensure the numbers match.


Well, there are auditable voting protocols which don't suffer from this problem (David Chaum has done lots of work on this), so you don't have to choose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...




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