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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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That gets you "nobody can see my vote", but you can still be coerced into showing your vote. There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was. But you still need someone to implement it in a system which selects lowest-bid contracts, and to convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.

People need to understand a voting system to believe in it (see: 2020), and so I'd much rather a heavy clampdown on postal voting, and a return to hand-counting everywhere. Other first world nations can do this, so why can't we?

There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was.

As a very simple example of a system I've occasionally pondered -- which I'm not sure I'd describe as "homomorphic encryption" per se, more a zero-knowledge proof of election outcomes. "For each ballot, the voter calls a fair coin toss. If they win, keep the ballot. If they lose, replace it with a randomly selected ballot. Final resulting ballots are public, but the initial coin flip is never recorded." This is overwhelmingly likely to not change the outcome of the election, and any specific ballot can be verified by voters but they will be unable to convince a third party that the recorded vote for Kang was the result of the coin toss and that they intended to vote for Kodos.

convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.

Yeah, this is really the hard part. I don't think I'd trust a coin toss even in my presence to decide something so important. I know abstractly that the statistics work out, but it feels viscerally disenfranchising.

I know abstractly that the statistics work out, but it feels viscerally disenfranchising.

It sounds to me like your instincts are picking up the increased potential for someone to sneakily cheat under these systems. As a voter, can you tell that the coin toss you're making is fair without referring to outside expertise? If it takes an expert to make the determination that part of the system is working correctly, it gets much easier to cheat.