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Comment by bewaretheirs | Hacker News Reader

Best option is paper ballots that are machine-readable and human-readable.

Cryptography doesn't help; what you need are processes which make fraud difficult (for instance, observers with line of site to all ballot boxes from when voting starts until they're counted; cross-checking counts of blank, spoiled, and voted ballot papers before & after voting, translucent ballot boxes that are clearly empty at the start of election day, etc.,)

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And, while I think you hint at this, every single voter must be able to understand the entire process.

The manual process as described? Everyone gets it, can watch it in action. Code, encryption, are understood by few, auditable by fewer.

I'm not sure it even matters how difficult fraud is. Conspiracy theorists will see what they want to see, especially when primed by their candidate to assume fraud in the case of a loss.

Accurate Voting seems like the most viable use case for triple entry accounting, you know that thing that got created in 2009 by that mysterious Satoshi guy and everyone hates it now and thinks it’s a Ponzi scheme- totally legitimate use case here with voting and the only real world scenario I know of where the solution hasn’t located the problem yet.

Exit polls are also an important tool. They show routine, systematic fraud in US elections, starting with the introduction of electronic voting, mostly in areas without paper trails. I'll try to keep this non-partisan, but there are plenty of independent peer-reviewed papers showing clear evidence of count tampering, and they all implicate the same party.

Hint: It's not the party that keeps proposing paper ballot mandates at the federal level.

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