> But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system.

This has the same problem. Didn't waive your right to privacy and provably vote for the right candidate - you're fired (or worse). That's why taking photos of a ballot isn't allowed, you can't have any way to show who you voted for.

Re: employer, you can just make this illegal and let the police deal with it. Your boss can probably get in trouble with HR for even asking who you voted for (as it provides fodder for a later discrimination lawsuit), though you're free to volunteer that information.

However, your "or worse" note still applies. E.g. a local gang could do the same thing, and they are unlikely to be stymied by illegality.

Huh? If you're asked to waive your right by your employer, I'm pretty sure you can get them in trouble by going to the media and make a fuss about it. This is a silly hypothesis.

I don't know if this is true. Assuming this is an established practice by large companies, there would also be a cultural notion (by managers agreeing with the sentiment, CEOs, famous executives espousing it) that hiding your voting patterns means you are voting for the "wrong people". Plus, by going to the media, you'll be permanently known to any future employer as a rat on your company's practices. While this is good for society it has personal consequences to you.

It's no different from an evil employer who forces their employees to vote and send a picture of their ballot today. Sure, taking a photo of a ballot is illegal, but that's not going to prevent it from happening when you're behind that little curtain. Coercing people to vote for your guy is illegal in both scenarios and you can and will get in trouble if you try and pull that stunt at any significant scale.

When you vote on a paper ballot, you are entitled to request a new sheet of paper if you've messed up a vote. In effect, this would allow you to take a picture of one ballot, toss it, and get another.

So, yes, it is quite different - an employer has no way to validate that an employee has voted a specific way. Any proof is not indicative of the final vote, unlike the proposed Blockchain solution.

But what if our elections are rigged and we don't know it? Is it worth risking a faked election as long as we all feel good about it?

As someone else in the thread pointed out, we already know of a better solution: paper. Any other solution so far turns out to be either convoluted and/or not as good.

Somewhat related, it reminds me of this anecdote about hand-warming handlebars on bikes: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...

The problem with paper is that it's too easy to remove and replace the ballots you don't like.

Being physical, you would physically have to remove the previous vote first. This would require some combination of a chemical process, color matching, and/or glue piecing back on.

This all takes time, tight tolerances, and automation to a happen at an impactful scale, which minimal oversight would mostly prevent.

Compare this to an SQL statement to change a whole states worth of votes in a few hundred milliseconds.

You can always recount the paper.

Whatever solution, it require the limitation of involving something physical and difficult to manipulate.

Not really. Best practices in the field involve having representatives from many to all parties present at each step of the voting process, from the distribution of ballots at the booth, to the counting, to the archiving of counted boxes pending recounts.

In Washington State, photographs of each ballot are taken as the ballot is removed from the envelope and after it has been electronically tabulated. This prevents someone from replacing a paper ballot along the way.

Good thing photos can't be deleted. Oh wait.

Photos can be deleted. It would be detected and then law enforcement would or would not do anything.

A blockchain voting system would enable us to detect vote tampering, and then law enforcement would or would not do something about it.

What's the difference?

IMO, 99% of the people wont understand a blockchain system. To them it will just be "X won because a computer said so". So the question is do we want society to be filled with people thinking "I know those votes were made with pen on paper and were counted by my neighbors and trusted friends" or do we want society filled with people who think "it must be true because a computer said so"?

Not across thousands of voting places.

All states allow absentee voting, so...

Mail in voting is a problem. It's too easy to game.

No, it’s not.

It’s easy to tamper with one ballot, but the level of coordination required to tamper with a large number of them quickly enough trends into the impossible category. Especially if you’re trying to keep such an operation a secret.

You don't need to tamper with them.

It’s hard to destroy a large amount of them and get away with it too for the exact same reasons.

You don't need to destroy a large amount.

So we shouldn't attempt anything that could be overridden by illegal activities by employers?

We shouldn't attempt anything that'd make their illegal behaviour easier.

Like mandatory armbands for your religion, a public record of your voting activities is a terrible and dangerous idea.

You could say the same thing about tax returns, credit reports, Facebook accounts, medical records, etc. For all these things an employer would benefit by coercing an employee to provide them to the employer. But the risk is worth the reward, so we still have these things. Why is a semi-anonymous voting database any different? I could think of some easy mitigations to your concerns with almost no thought. Make it so that only those who's vote hashes end in a certain number get their private key, so you have plausible deniability. Say 10%. A sample of that size should be enough to verify the vote.

If your employer uses medical records to disqualify you from a position or terminate your employment, get a lawyer because you have a case.

None of those things you mention should be something employers can act on. In many states it would be illegal to factor those things into decisions about hiring, retention, compensation or promotion.

Call centers get entire lists of registered votes (or what they last were registered as) when targeting for polls.

Now they do not come with who the individual voted for which is probably how they get around this.

So many times when you would call someone and say, "Records show you are a registered as a democrat/republican, is that correct?"

Rebuttal, "How do you know what I'm registered as isn't that illegal?"

Candid response, "Knowing who you voted for is illegal, I do not have that information, however your registered party is public information and any questions about who you voted for you can refuse."

Most of the time they didn't like that and hung up but meh throws arms up in the air not caring

If it’s even possible to waive anonymity, people will try to entice or coerce others to vote in a certain way, and require they prove it. That’s why taking a picture of your ballot is illegal in the US.

This isn’t just a theoretical concern - there are various real-life allegations of it happening, in Southeastern Europe and other places.

Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody.

Plus such coercion isn't impossible now, like you said it can be done with a camera. Presumably if you're being coerced by threat the "illegal" doesn't really help you at all.

It seems obscene to me to pass up such an obvious improvement like a verifiable record over such a theoretical concern.

>Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody.

1) Coercion is literally the biggest concern within elections. You put a big guy with a pair of brass knuckles outside of the polling location and he beats up everyone who comes out without a picture of his ballot with the right vote in place.

Theoretical? Lol. This WAS and IS common. This is why we have international election observers.

2) There's no integrity loss with paper if things are done right. Every ballot given out at a voting booth is recorded - you can't stuff the box as a voter. The only way you can do so is if election officials from all parties collude to fudge the books together, which they would need to do in view of the public as they man the voting desks, or under the supervision of the locale manager during the end-of-night count.

You know what else is verifiable?

Paper.

For the record, I far prefer paper ballots over closed-source digital voting.

I don't have such faith in blockchain anonymity. Data will leak.

See the paper "Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers" which talks about using timing based reconciliation, relationships between wallets, and superficial metadata within Bitcoin to deanonymize human traffickers:

http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sysnet/miscpapers/backcoin-kdd17....

There’s no reason to have identifying information at all. That would be handled at the voting location just like it is now.

Blockchain voting doesn’t mean you can then vote over the Internet — you’d just have a better type of system in place at the voting locations.

Incrementalism is powerful.

The problem with blockchains in this situation is that your security has to be perfect forever. If anyone figures out a way to de-anonymize votes, they get all of them due to the public and append only nature of blockchain systems.

I suppose every election they could randomly distribute voter ids that are unique to that election? Ie, pull an I'd from a hat at the polling station then use it and keep it for verification?

Edit: undo auto'correct'

Because now you can prove to anybody which way you voted, opening yourself to blackmail, bribery, or duress. The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity.

Maybe you could move things down the chain: make it illegal for any entity (with perhaps some exceptions for anonymity compliant polling) to ask for voting proof, with very significant felony punishments (large organizational fines, jailtime for individuals).

Or you can just use a voting system where producing proof is non-trivial, like paper ballots.

You may not want to sell your vote, but others will. And the mere suspicion that other people can sell their votes erodes trust in the system, making it useless for a democracy.

Criminals don't follow laws. Plenty of things are felonies, they still happen, often.

"The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity."

Secrecy is also what makes it possible to stuff the ballot box with fake votes.

And multiple independent observers watching the process can make that pretty hard to do at significant scale.

Can we just not blockchain voting and move on to other things?

Thanks.

> Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.

Not likely. Social stigma means the "acceptable" candidate would have a larger proportion of the public votes than total votes. For example, the Democrat candidate in Chicago.