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