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0 pointswar10255y ago0 comments

The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand.

That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested parties from the time they are cast to the time they are counted.

The more technical you get with your voting solutions, the less overall trust the public will have in the final vote counts.

0 comments

sebmellen5y ago

I understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate...

In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.

war1025OP5y ago

Most of the arguments I saw were about the chain of custody being broken and allegations that ballots were tampered with at that point. That is different from not understanding how a paper ballot works.

tylerhou5y ago

Most people who claim that there was fraud in the election focus on the voting machines — that they were programmed to "flip" votes, there were servers in Germany, or they had some linearly "weighted" mode which was allegedly turned on. They claim that "the algorithm" caused the election to be stolen from Trump.

If we created a cryptographic voting system with homomorphic encryption to preserve privacy, they would be claiming the exact same thing — except in that case, you wouldn't be able to recount the ballots by hand.

chrisco2555y ago

I think paper + blockchain. Paper ballot with anti-counterfeit tech (maybe fingerprint requirement as well for uniqueness check), scanned with an image recorded on blockchain (or hash of image stored on chain), then I think ballot images should be publicly viewable (with personal info redacted) so anyone can audit.

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