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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31017 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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/u/2rafa suggests an easy fix: mail out two ballots, so you can fill out one and take a picture of the other. I'm not sure if this causes problems by double-voting; how much of voting security is the trivial inconvenience of producing a duplicate ballot?

Alternatively you can just go after people posting photos. If you slap fines on the first hundred or thousand, the others should desist.

With 2 ballots I, the coercer simply make you take a picture of both filled out. I suppose making ballots free to print as many as you like and having a secret keyphrase which must be on 'real' ballots cast could help, but if the phrase is compromised, or the fake phrases you put on your coerced ballots don't match up, I will realisze your trick and punish you.

Best solution I can think of is mail a secured tablet to each voter, which is covered in cameras and records the voting session, only allowing those votes not recorded or with witnesses. This can still be bypassed by hidden cameras, as can normal voting, and is expensive.

With how important secret ballots seem to be to government, I'm surprised they aren't used in industry. I believe most if not all shareholder voting is public. I wonder if the secret ballot is more to legitimize elections and make the governed more compliant than it is to ensure a vital process. That would explain the posturing, but lack of real security measures.

I think the real answer is that a few people voluntarily try to relinquish secrecy in order to try and create peer pressure (and that's vile), but there's no serious push to defeat secret voting going on.

Nobody's worried because nobody thinks there's a serious risk.

I can see it. Controlling people's ideas and behavior outside of voting with propaganda and norms already does waaay more than a forceful system focused on elections could ever hope to achieve, and I don't think I've heard of one place which successfully got rid of the secret ballot.

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