Private and secure voting system

That’s a ridiculous assumption. ID numbers are tied to an identity, any fake ID numbers could be easily identified. Plus, you would also need to fake the population count, since your vote count can’t be higher than your population. Plus, if the number of IDs are higher than your population, it would be suspicious.

So, in the case of proper verification, this would fail. And if the political system is such that no checks are in place, then it would be easier for the government to just falsely reports the votes.


We have to remember that while your vote is secret, the act of voting is not, and will never be. If they were no ID check in place, then people would just vote multiple times.

I really don’t see how voting is a private info, but of course who you vote for is.

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Firstly, ID numbers are only tied to an identity because the government itself maintains a database. The reality is that no state—not even North Korea, where voting is compulsory—has 100% voter turnout, as well as the fact that no state has a perfect census of its population. So I would argue both these points are effectively moot. Secondly, the government is absolutely capable of creating fake identities, see WITSEC and Cover (intelligence_gathering). Even if you could discover the existence of fake identities and the fact that they had voted, it would be impossible to remove those votes as they cannot be tied back to specific ID numbers.

Although it may seem unrealistic, the greater point I was getting at was that election fraud in this way is not even conceivable in a traditional, non-electronic/online election.

I see the use of some fallacies. Saying that people something isn’t perfect it’s equivalent to none.

First, you generally need a birth certificate in the first place to get an ID. So in any cases, your eligible voters are births-deaths+immigration.

That’s not true. It might depend on where you live, but there is always a copy ( Cast Vote Record (CVR)) of the ballots casted, even for electronic votes. See US Voluntary_Voting_System Guidelines

Imagine the potential chaos if you created thousands, or millions of fake identities. They would at some point end up in the hand of criminals, ensuring chaos for LE.

It is definitely possible, but it’s definitely harder. One issue though is vote suppresion. I saw that in the US one mail ballot box was lit on fire.

But I am generally not in support of electronic vote, principally because it introduce distrust.

I would rather you address my arguments than unjustly dismiss them as fallacies, particularly when there are fallacies in your own arguments.

I am not claiming that because something isn’t perfect it is worthless, however, it is true that less than all the eligible voting population votes and that therefore fake votes could conceivably be cast without exceeding 100% voter turnout.

Once again all of this is centrally controlled by the government and could likely be manipulated on a large scale (especially if the government was incentivised to design the system in such a way).

I am not based in the US so please forgive my ignorance if I am incorrect. But from what I gather the cast vote record simply ties a voter X to a vote Y. Basically there should be one voter for each vote cast but it does not link voter X to any identity.

I don’t entirely see how this is relevant. The identities would only have to be ID numbers, which can be used to cast votes. After that, they could be deleted, but regardless it would be impossible to tie a vote back to any identity. It wouldn’t be dissimilar to the vote of a dead person still being perfectly valid even if they passed away the same day. Additionally, lists of ID numbers are for obvious reasons not public information.

I think that’s the and/or a major concern with electronic voting. It’s not even necessarily that the methods of election fraud are novel, but rather that the potential scale can be much greater with relative ease.

idk about other places but in the US the machine basically just prints your ballot out on a piece of paper and you can check and make sure it got all your selections. That seems like a decent way to do it. Keep it simple: stick to paper.

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zero knowledge proof.

might as well just cross it yourself with a pencil, far less expensive and less error prone.

The cost should be assessed because printing millions of ballots (last week we voted with 4 ballots, 2 of them 40cmx50cm) versus a machine.

Well not quite, believe it or not there have been issues in the past with people not filling the answer in or answer multiple candidates on the same line, the machine helps prevent that.

This guy talks about how much messed up ballots affected US elections in the past.

Yup, and India also does something similar with VVPATs, which are like verification slips voters see when they vote from my limited understanding. These are then matched with actual votes on machine for a random selection of voting locations.

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