[ai_ja_nai]

This is plain bullshit. Opensource gives no guarantee that the vote won't be altered by whoever runs the machine.

What we need is a zero-knowledge proof: we need the entire voting dataset to be publicly downloadable and some kind of checksumming so that, while maintaining anonimity, I can 1)check that my vote is the same 2)run whole the counting in a blink on my PC.

This gives much better guarantees of no tampering

[Ajedi32]

One other requirement too.

3) Users should not be able to prove to another person who they voted for

This is to prevent people from using threats of violence or promise of reward to coerce others into voting a certain way.

Unfortunately, this requirement is very hard to fulfil while also fulfilling requirement 1.

[deathanatos]

4. Check that all votes in the tally belong to actual, eligible voters.

Verifying your vote is in the sum, and tallied, is not good enough if the result is swamped with, or more craftily, the balance just tipped by fake votes.

I have no idea how you would implement that.

[cmiles74]

I think this make a lot of sense. I'm not sure a checksumming method that can indicate tampering can be devised, but my hope would be that by making the data publicly available for every stage of the processing pipeline, auditors or interested parties might be able to detect fraud.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

But the data is worthless if you cannot trust the way is has been acquired.

[cmiles74]

I'm not sure there's a way that a skeptical person can ever trust that data, short of physically handling each piece of paper and manually summing up the totals. People are as much of a black box as any software.

I suppose the only benefit of people is that they are more difficult to coordinate.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

The point is not using people in place of machines as trust anchors. The point is that you remove the trust anchor (or move it to the public at large, really).

In a properly run paper election, there is no individual that you have to trust. In principle, anyone can go and watch, and usually there are representatives of many/all parties in every polling place, watching every step of the process. It's not just that people are more difficult to coordinate or control in general, it's that if someone distrusts you, they can come and watch for themselves.

[kennydude]

This does not ensure the data itself isn't wrong.