[dola]

this is on a similar level of trust as the question about whether your paper vote is actually counted by some volunteer or just scraped. But I agree, that e-voting systems require a high level of trust by the users but I would argue that it is comparable to the trust you need in letter voting. The main difference in my view is the authority is typically split between fewer people with an e-voting system giving a single person more potential influence when they abuse their power. (e.g. a single server admin can deploy a malicious version of the system rather than a person only having access to maybe a few thousand ballots)

[VLM]

Speaking of trust, your comments are interesting and over the decades I've been struck by the symmetry and asymmetry between evoting systems and our heavily automated financial system. There is enormous financial reward to corrupt an e-voting system and enormous financial reward to provide a trustworthy secure financial system. No great surprise which system works and which system will never work.

The solution seems simple at first glance; scrap the entire voting system, scrap the entire fundraising system, and whichever candidate receives more individual $1 donations via check or money order wins. You can vote a dollar to as many candidates as you want but your federal tax return for that year is only getting a single $1 election credit. You could require the candidates to declare to the IRS each $1 contributor which makes election fraud also a form of income tax fraud.

Certainly, our financial marketplaces and clearinghouses at their absolute worst are more trustworthy and reliable than our evoting systems at their absolute best. And the additional infrastructure to transfer a hundred million bucks every four years is utterly trivial (well, more often due to primaries and midterm elections, but its still a drop in the bucket ...)

The anonymity emperor has no clothes, anyway. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology everyone who matters already knows exactly who you voted for and your complete financial life, you're just plausibly deniable on an individual basis against some non-state opfor some of the time. May as well face reality and make all votes part of the public financial record. Sure, it sucks. But better to face a reality you don't like, than to live in a fantasy world of completely broken anonymity. Living a lie means you'll slip up and the consequences of the slip up are likely worse than the lack of anonymity itself.

[tobltobs]

> this is on a similar level of trust as the question about whether your paper vote is actually counted by some volunteer or just scraped.

No, if you don't trust that your paper vote is actually counted you could stay in the election hall all day, watch the counting, check the when the results are transmitted. You don't have any comparable option with e-voting.