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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

Who voted is public record (depending on your state [1]), so the numbers should add up.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-v...

Also, there is another scenario. Let's say the rules allow to change the vote later. A voter votes for candidate X and gets a link that allows to verify that the vote is recorded. But several hours later the server software re-votes for candidate Y. If the voter bothers to check results after election, they will find that their vote was altered. But the voter has no proof that they didn't vote for candidate Y, and election officials have server logs that prove that the voter has voted two times. So probably the voter is just lying because they don't want to accept the fact that candidate Y is supported by 99% of population.

And one more scenario: before closing the elections, officials can make a list of people who didn't vote and vote for them. If they didn't vote they probably don't care about elections and won't find out that someone voted for them.

» And one more scenario: before closing the elections, officials can make a list of people who didn't vote and vote for them. If they didn't vote they probably don't care about elections and won't find out that someone voted for them.

This could already happen today. This is why all major candidates, even in these united states, send their own observers and not simply trust election officials to do their job.

That's what I wanted to say: with paper voting, you can observe voting and counting the results. With electronic voting it might be difficult.

I think you mean "does", or at least, "did". I have spoken with more than one political operative who has voted for the dead, for instance. Probably much more common in NYC (and other places suffering from machine politics, like Chicago).

What if it is not a public record? Also, even if it is a public record, how can you be sure that people in the voters list are real, they are eligible to vote in this region and not made up by authorities?

Also, even if the list of people who voted is public, and if results were falsified, with electronic voting you cannot estimate the scale of falsification. Did they alter just a hundred of votes or hundred thousands.

Is the electoral roll not publicly available information where you are.

If John Doe is listed as having voted, but is fake, how would you know he's fake?

There are also lists of who lives in a county/state/country. If you suspect foul play you can further look up if John Doe is a person that lives in the 'right' place. Of course this doesn't solve the case where John Doe is a real person that is allowed to vote, but actually stayed home.

How in the world would you know to suspect foul play from specific people though? Especially when they can be a very small fraction of the population?

With paper voting, an observer can manually count the number of people coming to the polling station. With electronic voting, this becomes impossible, because you either only see the final list or (sometimes) you see the hashes of votes being cast in real time, but you don't know whether it is a real person or just sysadmin voting under name of a random person.

So with electronic voting, it becomes necessary to verify lists of voters.

You will typically get voter registration ID, just like in paper votes so you should be able to trace. The only thing different in electronic voting is that you sign vote with your private key which becomes your signature. So in theory, whatever can you do by receiving signed paper from someone, you can also do by encrypted content from someone.

> You will typically get voter registration ID, just like in paper votes so you should be able to trace. The only thing different in electronic voting is that you sign vote with your private key which becomes your signature. So in theory, whatever can you do by receiving signed paper from someone, you can also do by encrypted content from someone.

Either you're responding to the wrong comment or I'm failing to see how this is at all relevant to what I asked. How does tracing your own vote tell you if John Doe was fake?

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