this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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I wonder if one can use ghost keys for an anonymous voting system, which still ensures that a voter only votes once, and still makes all votes verifiable.
That would have much fewer issues.
No need to use some fantastically obscure hardware. Source code being open is not bad.
A voting system is the easiest thing to emulate. Except for load.
Even if you could make a perfect digital system through encryption and keys and further complexities, to the layman this is effectively a magic black box that they have to trust does the job. If you can't explain it simply to that layman without saying "trust me bro", it doesn't fix the primary problem we currently have with our voting system, the lack of trust in the system.
There's a solution of vote not being anonymous, so that everyone can check if their own vote has been stolen, and everyone can see if there are anomalies in distribution of voters.
But then you have the issue of voter retaliation and discrimination. That already happens in certain places in this country if someone even thinks you vote a certain way. If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.
What if you lose a job because of the way you voted? An employer would not have to disclose that as the reason or any reason at all. Most states are employ at will states where you can be hired or fired for any reason at all with a handful of exceptions. And even with those exceptions, it is very very difficult to prove if those exceptions have been broken.
Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.
In some sense that'd be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who'd do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.
There's another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it'd be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it'd be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.
And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.
EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.
It's a huge problem in today's world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who's considered the victim and the good guy and who's the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.
Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.
And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who "testified" before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I'm not mistaken.
So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.