[croon]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two competing issues here:

1) You could make digital elections secure with issued digital IDs, and simply recording everyone's vote and it would be easily auditable.

But no one wants elections where (the contents of) your vote is recorded somewhere.

So 2) You use your digital ID to be able to vote once, but if you're no longer connected to your vote, it would be much more susceptible to tampering if you can't establish a double blind chain of custody of the votes, which is what expensive in person voting is doing very well.

The first option would be great if you could somehow guarantee a corruption free future of your country where no one will come after you for your vote (hint: you can't).

[fivestones]

Isn’t there a way to do the first option, but without attaching anyone’s votes to their digital id, except in a cryptographic way such that any individual person can look up their own vote online and verify that their vote has been counted correctly (with their own personal cryptographic key if some kind), but no one without the key can see which person made a given vote? I’m sure I remember watching a Ted talk about this years ago, but don’t remember the specific talk at the moment.

I’m sure there are other obstacles to surmount, but if that system works, you could have a digital id, use it to vote every time, and audit your own vote without anyone else knowing what you voted.

[rkomorn]

Until someone with the proverbial $5 wrench shows up and tells you to unlock your last election's vote to prove you're one of the good guys?

I don't think we should ever be able to know any individual's vote.

[croon]

How would you audit that all encrypted votes belong to one and only one other eligible voter?

[fivestones]

This is a good critique, and I’ve been wondering the same ever since watching that TED talk. Still. I’m not sure it’s much worse (or worse at all) than what we have right now, at least in the USA. Maybe I’m wrong about that though?

[croon]

Ballots are locked up and have detailed logs for where and who is handling them, and all critical processes have mutual verification from all (or both in reality) parties.

Ballot reconciliation ensures that every ballot printed is tracked, as well as ballots counted and ballots cast match up.

And as it is spread out over counties and districts, any injection anywhere would fail those checks.

I'm not an expert, and there is likely at lot more depth to this, but I did try to read up on it after the 2020 election and was sufficiently convinced at the time at least, but I'm happy for anyone to correct me.