> This is a bad idea even in concept. If anyone can validate their vote went for the candidate of their choice, someone else can force them to perform the same validation for money, under threat of violence, familial ostracism, or whatever really.

I responded to this issue in the previous thread about this. But short answer is: create a verifiable but also deniable scheme.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16598591

That’s a proposal, not a proven solution, and it assumes that the chosen algorithm, implementation, and operation are all perfect or it fails open. That’s why you need to look at this as a system rather than a chance to use the current fad: this class of proposal replaces something which is cheap, robust, easy to understand, and fails closes with something complex and unproven which most people would cannot make accurate threat assessments about. There’d have to be a huge win to make up for that and “it costs a lot more and my startup could cash in” doesn’t count.