More important than lack of voter fraud is proving to the population a lack of voter fraud.

I'm sure you could even let every voter verify that their vote has been registered correctly.

Edit: But as a comment somewhere else in the tree noted ,,And if it could tell you that then a third party could force you to reveal that you voted "right" as agreed before.`` - I guess everything's trade-offs.

This. A voting system and it security must be understandable to the average people. You can not do that with electronic voting. (Even if electronic voting can be done securely.)

Why?

One of the main goals of an electoral system is to ensure that the population trusts that their views are fairly represented.

The reason that paper voting is so good in this regard is that everybody can fully understand the entire process. It is so very, very simple. And if you need proof, you can go see the counting for yourself.

The issue with electronic voting is that there is far greater complexity. There are many valid reasons that someone could distrust it, for example:

- You might not trust the cryptography experts that claim the algorithms are secure.

- You might not trust the algorithms to be implemented correctly.

- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have designed a secure machine.

- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have built a defect-free machine.

- You might not trust the machine hasn't been compromised by some bad actor.

- You might not trust that there hasn't been some random bit-flips.

- You might just not understand how computers work.

- ect. ect.

Note that it is not important whether it can be proved to be correct and secure. The unique goal here is that everyone can prove to themselves that it is correct and secure. It must be obvious to everyone that they can trust it.

In my opinion, this is not possible to achieve with an electronic system.

>One of the main goals of an electoral system is to ensure that the population trusts that their views are fairly represented.

Do you trust the system now enough to say your views are fairly represented (looking at the war and ... all the other things) ?

> The reason that paper voting is so good in this regard is that everybody can fully understand the entire process. It is so very, very simple. And if you need proof, you can go see the counting for yourself.

I volunteered as a scrutineer for a major Canadian political party as a teenager. You show up and watch the electionworkers open the ballot box and count the ballots. The ballots were counted fairly although some people couldn't tick the boxes correctly.

It's unclear how such a system would work in the United States, though, because you've merged all elections into a single voting day. If people struggle with ticking a single box from 5 options I can't imagine what a multipage ballot binder would be.

Some counter-arguments:

- We already trust computers to run our markets, banks, cars, energy infrastructure, etc. Is a computer popularly untrustworthy?

- Do low-tech physical ballot systems offer good guarantees? See 2024 Russian elections [0], for an extreme counter-example.

I'd say cryptography or smart algorithms can go a long way in upholding certain invariants, but you need some infrastructure for that: e.g. key pairs per voter and a trustless counting system. If you can't get that, then you're relying on the good will of others: in some cases it's the volunteer counters, in others it's whoever deploys and operates the trust-based black box e-voting system. I think that cryptocurrencies alone should be proof to anyone observant that a trustless voting system is doable, though I'm honestly surprised by this thread, because it alludes to the opposite.

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/03/20/t...

Okay, average person uses a special key picked up from the DMV one time that allows them to login to vote.com and cast their vote. This is a totally normal experience and understandable by anyone who has done online banking.

It doesn't provide anonymity, which is a critical requirement for any (public) election system. It also doesn't provide security, as someone who can control the servers behind vote.com, can change anyone's vote.

How does it not apply anonymity? All you see is some vote came in with a particular public key. That's it. Thats more private than we have now

The Rivest methods in the CSR13 paper - ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin - seem to be relatively simple. Not directly applicable to online voting, though, but perhaps they would be simple enough to prove to the people that regular voting has no voter fraud?