[aianus]

I appreciate the thorough response and it does sound better than what I had envisaged.

However, there is still no way for me as an individual to know for certain that my vote has been counted. The best I can do is trust in the physical security practices surrounding the ballot box and the honesty of the volunteers involved. And even with a margin of error of < 1%, elections have been decided by fewer votes than that (~15 votes in my riding in Waterloo, ON in a recent election) and recounts are expensive, slow, and contentious.

I encourage you to watch the tech talk when you have a spare hour. We have the technology to create a much better and more transparent system.

[dobbsbob]

We don't. I remind every group that tries to automate voting in my province that on election day somebody is going to denial of service the system to use it as an attention seeking platform which will just force a physical vote anyways. Other ideas floated like blockchain decentralized voting are also impossible since none of us can run a trusted personal device to vote with, and plenty of voters have no access or don't want access to phones or any other devices. Worse, every couple of elections there's some sort of scandal where a foreign "politically exposed person" has been caught propping up local candidates or outright fielding their own puppet to seemingly unimportant elections like the parks board so they can reap real estate or resource mining benefits. Imagine what kind of havoc a foreign state could wreak on an electronic voting scheme.

It's much more transparent to just do it by hand count though they tried to sabotage that too http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/03/11/dont-undermin...

[hibikir]

Full, transparency across time makes it easy to buy people's votes, or punish people for voting the wrong way. The moment I can check that my vote was counted, and was counted accurately, then my boss/landlord/wife/friend could pressure me into showing them said record.

The fact that I can vote very differently from what is socially acceptable in my social group, and there is no way for them to know is a feature, not a bug.

[aianus]

Watch the tech talk. It's possible to prove to yourself that your vote was counted correctly and simultaneously be unable to prove it to others.