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Showing posts from September, 2016

#7844 Electronic voting

Electronic voting. Yea, even internet voting. Really shouldn't be impossible. Tom Scott says this is a terrible idea, but I don't think it's so unsolvable. The ways to cheat are: - stuffing the ballot box with bogus votes - counting or recording the votes bogusly - voting more than once or voting for someone else Voter confidentiality must be preserved.  Here's my solution.  - every voter must authenticate with some non-government system that 1) ensures user ID uniqueness 2) contains a method for contacting the voter (can be a form obscuring contact details) 3) creates a random code which is not retained by the system. This is easily done by Google, Facebook, or any tiny NGO. They would need to register and be subject to audit. - when a user votes, the data is logged in two public registers. 1) a voters register showing the person's user ID (or a unique variant from the authenticator) 2) a vote register showing the random code and how they voted