Now if only we could have an API to vote ...
The only info we should provide electronically is that your vote was counted at all. Direct value verification would have to be done in person and under supervision.
In Russia all state employees, say school teachers, are told to vote the right way under no uncertain terms. But come the election day, and it is not physically possible to inspect what everyone is doing with paper ballots. If it was possible to digitally check voting, the regime would be even more repressive.
If you have an abusive spouse, voting is your last problem.
Just people who never bothered to update their voter registration.
Completed ballots are supposed to be verified by signature (at least in CA), but I have no idea how thorough this is.
And I imagine if they are mail in, could they even find people who completed all 4 ballots, then dropped them in some random mail box? From what I gather they just reject a vote if they can't match signatures.
That's what the one-way hash is for. If you're forced to provide a password beforehand, you can provide extra bogus passwords that cast ballots for both sides. The system can allow you to do this an arbitrary number of times.
As far as paper ballots go, nothing stops someone from bullying you into taking a video of you voting and dropping it into the ballot box.
And yet this doesn't happen in real life, so it's not a real problem.
Maybe because it's unmanageable and impractical to transfer, store anf watch 50 million videos of voting. But checking a hash is easy and automateable.
Impossible to prove. You don't want people changing their votes. People wouldn't accept results if they change after the fact.
nevertheless, you can tell that a voter is a registered D, I, or R. you can tell if they turned in a ballot in a given election.
in jurisdictions where registered voters cannot vote for candidates of the other party (many), then yes, you can then reasonably infer their vote, with a margin of error equal to rates of write-ins for that party in that election.
I mean sure, with the EU's NFC chips in passports and ID cards there can be an app that compares that to a 3D selfie (there are already apps that do that for lesser government services), but the risks associated in getting it wrong are still too great. Not to mention the lack of transparency which is paramount for a healthy democracy.
Maybe not use it for elections but maybe for polling on issues or a replacement for petitions and/or referendums. Enabling some aspects of direct democracy especially at local levels. But i think this would need to be public or overly transparent to enable people to trust the outcome or become aware of any attacks on the system.
It also helps that their population and schooling system prioritizes coding and technical literacy.
Maybe this is why US can't keep up its space program but China can.