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Notes -
Secrecy in Voting
Why have it? What's it for? I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:
Fundamentally, this is a story of coercion. If someone is able to learn how you're going to vote or how you voted, they can apply coercion to get you to change your vote or try to inflict punishments on you after-the-fact in retaliation for voting the "wrong way". Some people are also worried about bribes, but that's a more minor concern in my view. Critically, in order to perform coercion/bribing, they need to be able to discover who you actually vote for, so as to properly verify whether you should be punished or paid for doing the deed "poorly" or "well". Naturally, if someone is going to apply coercion to guide your vote, they're probably willing to apply coercion to get you to provide proof.
There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone, even the voter herself, possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).
In any event, the linked opinion from Arizona.
"voters' ability to conceal their choices". They have shifted from 'inability to reveal' to 'ability to conceal'. Why have it? What's it for?
Ah yes, the legislature has commanded that it not be seen. Except by the entire internet. Or literally anyone else that she chooses to show (or is coerced into showing) it to. I have almost no words except again, "Why have it? What's it for?" The court here seems to embrace a position that is completely ignorant of even the possibility of coercion. Or maybe it's not the purpose of secrecy that they fail to understand; maybe it's the purpose of photography. Photography is meant to allow a thing to be seen by someone at a time/place other than the original moment/location, even if the original object is long gone or destroyed. Taking a photograph of a thing and then showing it to someone else literally has the purpose of making that thing become "seen" by the someone else.
But photography is honestly a silly aside. Does anyone believe that there is a meaningful distinction between a voter showing a coercer/briber their ballot directly versus a photo of their ballot? Play this out in the absurd: A holds B at gunpoint, telling B to vote for candidate C. B marks down the ballot, and begins to reach out to show her work. "NO! Don't show it to me! That would be illegal. Instead, take out your phone; take a picture of it; show me the picture. That's totally legal and totally cool."
Haranguing about photography is clearly beside the point. The point is coercion! Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for! And one neat trick to 100% prevent it is to make it 100% impossible for anyone else to discover who you voted for - even if you want to show them. As evidenced by the entire body of literature on receipt-freeness, this is a thing that has been abundantly clear to the tech community, and those guys are usually some of the most boneheaded and slowest to understand history/politics.
Maybe one last attempt at words. This feels like watching a real life version of "catastrophic forgetting" in AI. How can people suddenly just have no clue what the whole point of this entire thing was, especially because you were just using it in all this work?
Couldn’t blockchain somehow save voting? Where everyone who wanted to could go online and count the votes and everyone could verify their vote was recorded correctly by having a private key to their specific Vote.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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