[jagbolanos]

I've been talking with people involved in elections in Honduras and they explained a technique that is normally used for paper ballots. It's called "La Cadena" (the chain) and it works like this.

A person goes to the voting center and gets a ballot That person goes to the booth and marks the ballot That person skips entering their ballot and goes out Shows the ballot to the coercer, verifying the vote The coercer gives the ballot to the next person The next person gets another ballot and has the previous one hidden. That person introduces the new ballot, hides the old one and goes out. And the chain goes on.

Apparently it's a common way to coerce votes in low income urban areas and rural areas. You only need distraction or complicity from a person from the voting table and it's hard to detect.

Another common issue is vote stuffing.

On the philosophical part, it is in the end a human problem, but with technology at least you should reduce the possibility of cheating

[vacri]

An interesting tactic, but that kind of coercion would also work with online voting - standover men forcing you to vote on their computer, where they can see and track you. I imagine this would be particularly effective in poorer areas with less access to computers.

Complicity is always going to be hard to work around (it's the primary fault vector of electronic voting), but it seems 'the chain' wouldn't be too difficult to detect - the standover men would have to farm the ballots from the outgoing people and get them back into the line going in (but again, complicity to look the other way...)

Vote stuffing is easy to workaround - have the ballot papers custom-marked as they're handed out.

> technology at least you should reduce the possibility of cheating

Technology also opens up lots of new avenues for cheating. It also has the problem of not being understandable by the layperson if they have to manage it in any way at all.

[Tortoise]

It's also trivially easy to defeat this. Here in Canada, your ballot has a counterfoil with a number on it. That number is only removed immediately before you deposit your vote into the ballot box. This ensures that the ballot you deposit is the same one you were given by the polling clerk.