> Mixnets allow you to verify that the data in is _identical_ to data out (modulo the salts) to make it so that data an anonymized.
I think this is the part I don't understand. Partly because I don't know anything about mixnets, and it feels like its paradoxical. But if that's how it is, then I can accept it.
Not OP, but that helped me at least, so thank you. The description of the mixnet seems a bit similar to the way Tor anonymizes where requests come. What I'm not clear on is how a voter can know that the mixnet is working correctly. I.e. I understand how the voter can verify that their second bubble from the top was recorded, but can they also verify that that was correctly counted as a vote for John Jackson?
You can't know which final ballot was your vote, but you can know that your ballot was in the mix coming in, and that the mix going out wasn't altered (within some probabilistic bounds).