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the issue isn't that people won't believe it or that blockchain can't preserve secrecy of ballots (it can). it is, in part, that crypto eventually has to meet the real world, but mainly that crypto is hard and governments might not be up to the task. for example, last year the IACR (which had been doing online voting via crypto for more than a decade, and still is) had to void their elections because one of the trustees lost their private key and the results were impossible to decrypt. while it was ultimately fine because the IACR isn't really a high-stakes operation, how would you feel if your government just said "sorry folks, there's been some technical issues and elections will have to be redone"? would you believe them or suspect they're up to no good? what if this happens in a very contended and heated election?

>I.e., you can have a paperless blockchain solution IFF you abandon vote secrecy. That is a very tough to swallow pill.

This is false. I know this is a common thought on HN because some formerly popular youtuber did a video about this topic that is still regularly reposted here, but he was already wrong in theory back then and it is certainly wrong in practice today. Secrecy/anonymity and verifiability are no longer mutually exclusive as anyone who is well versed in modern cryptography will be able to tell you.

I'd appreciate some references. That's not because I'm trying to put you down with a request for references, but clearly you have seen them, and I'd like to see them.

Also, you still have to convince the public.

I agree that convincing the public is a separate issue. But on a technical level, these problems are solved. See e.g. this modern implementation: https://github.com/vocdoni/davinci-paper This is a pretty recent one, but the mathematical foundation dates back to the late 80s.

There have also been earlier implementations like this one: https://github.com/benadida/helios (corresponding paper https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...), although it still lacked coercion resistance. But it already uses zero knowledge proofs, which is at the core of anonymous yet verifiable systems.

Thanks. Right, this is zero-knowledge proofs. I expected as much. I think that ZK can be made to work for secure voting, though I don't believe that the public can be expected to understand it. I'll have to read this, but I suspect that there is a way for possessors of secret keys to choose to decrypt ballots and violate ballot secrecy.

You know what's easy to understand? Hand marked paper ballots cast anonymously with multiple witnesses to simple optomechanical counting using open hardware and software. The crypto based security can be used to ensure that only a valid ballot enters the vote You have to combine the crypto with a paper trail. Otherwise it can be manipulated by mitm or a bad actor with the keys. Blockchain has more than enough attack vectors.

And so many special rules. Observers are constantly thrown out or denied rights, because even the local officials running the show don't know the rules. Because, in the end, it is not that simple. Berlin right now has an issue that they forgot to specify which of multiple valid method are used to calculate the excess mandates.

It is never as simple as just some paper ballots. But we have a bigger problem. It's a problem at scale. We have all those issues because we do not have enough experts to run all the voting locations at once. The observers need to understand the rules and their rights. The official needs to do so, too. The work of an expert is not scalable, because he cannot be at all places at once.

However, an expert who audits the software is very scalable. One expert can find issues everywhere.

> because even the local officials running the show don't know the rules.

Or because they do.

Exactly.

>Otherwise it can be manipulated by mitm or a bad actor with the keys.

That is not true. Or at least there are no known attack vectors. Modern privacy coins would not work otherwise.

It's totally not solved at a technical level, because the problem IS convincing the public.

The most recent DAVINCI paper is here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2282

See also a summary on how it works here: https://vocdoni.io/en/blog/davinci-paper-zisk-sequencer

We've been working on this protocol for the last years, and we do believe it solves or at least highly mitigates most of the current e-voting issues.

Nonetheless, quantum computing attacks are a new thread to also consider. But solutions to it might exist in the near future.

The various privacy-maximalist cryptocurrencies also serve as a fairly effective example imo, like Monero and Zcash. E.g. it seems pretty reasonable to say "one vote" is "one fixed-value transaction", and the count per member is just "they have X transactions in their receiving account". Both of these (one optionally) hide sender and recipient (and amount) while still having verifiable account-value = number of votes.

> Also, you still have to convince the public.

In terms of working democracy and social governance, we can kill a big flock of birds with a single shot if the public can understand cryptography. Think about it: we live in an age where everything is digital and has a microprocessor inside. Even money is digital. But the "public" can't parse simple logical statements, and they vote for the funniest clown in the race (for a definition of funny). The best this schism can possibly end is if we vote in a Luddite Empire that squashes technology. All other scenarios are far scarier.

Even if the average person had a working understanding of cryptography, which I think is highly unrealistic to begin with, that wouldn't be enough to give the system credibility.

For the system to be credible and resilient against coups it must be possible for the average person to audit the system end-to-end. This is impossible to achieve with online voting, yet trivially achievable with paper ballot systems:

An observer can verify that ID is being verified, that voter list is managed correctly, that every person is issued 1 ballot.

When votes are being counted they can see each ballot and count along with the officials. The number of ballots in the box must match the number of issued ballots based on the voter list.

They can get a copy of the report where they verify that the counts are correct. Then they can verify that the authorities indeed used the same numbers for their polling place in the final counts. And because you have cooperating like-minded observers in every polling place, you know that the final count is correct.

It's like a human-powered Merkle tree.

> some formerly popular youtuber did a video about this topic

I don't know about this event, do you have a link?

Probably Tom Scott

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

> Any blockchain approach

This doesn't directly affect your comment, but I'd like to head it off before more occur: "Distributed Database" != "Blockchain".

We've had distributed databases with hashes for many decades. It'd be cheap, easy, and fast to run a couple hundred pre-determined nodes controlled by many different governments and institutions who are unlikely to >50% collude.

In contrast, the different and new pieces for "Blockchain" all revolve around one root requirement of letting anybody start up an arbitrary number of nodes--which we don't need for elections. Without that requirement, dozens of problems and workarounds fall away, like the problem of voters standing around for transaction clearing times.

>I.e., you can have a paperless blockchain solution IFF you abandon vote secrecy. That is a very tough to swallow pill.

With voting you need to have one piece of the pipeline that is not auditable externally and taken on faith. It could be vote counting or it could be the step that matches your ephemeral signing key with your identity, but doesn't keep the logs.

This needs some level of integrity of the election administration body and public trust of it.

>A system that uses paper ballots and partial manual audits can be explained to the public, and the public can develop confidence in it.

It doesn't matter that the ballots are paper. What matters is they are at the same time a) given only to qualified voters (1x each) and b) are not tied to voters identities once issued and c) once cast are properly counted.

You can go all digital and gain B with a mixer, but this makes the process prone to denial of service and it's too complicated to explain anyway.

> only get running tallies every 50 ballots means you get vote secrecy

Not if everyone voted the same on something…

> The public needs to believe it, and hypertechnical solutions are a hard sell.

Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

> Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

Except that people know what paper looks and feels like, they know how it absorbs ink, they know its various properties, they can _read_ whatever is printed on them, and they can see that the marks they make (or a ballot marking device does for them) are faithfully visible on the paper. With paperless machines there is nothing comparable.

The problem is much simpler. If people could verify if their votes were counted correctly, at least 1 out of 20,000 would claim that their vote was counted incorrectly while it wasn't. Some are malicious, some pushed the wrong button, some just forgot that they changed their opinion since then.

That would be a very vocal minority that would immediately destroy any trust in the system.

Excellent point!

Most verification systems involve a receipt kept by the voter used for verification for this reason.

That would make coercion pretty easy.

*blinded

Maybe the great filter is civilization's ability to deal with "vocal minorities" in non-genocidal fashion by threading the middle way. Somehow it's either total fash to 11 or death by 1000 nimby cuts that want neither kerncentrale nor windturbines but 100% green energy cheaply at around the clock.

The public can observe that they choose their ballot/mark their ballot and drop it in a sealed box when they vote. If they want to they can hang around and observe how the box is brought in to another room and each ballot is counted and that the result is reported in to the bigger system where they later can see the results from all other districts and that the result from their district match with the result they can see in the official results. It's easy to understand. It's easy to understand and observe. If you digitize the voting process it's much much harder to understand and only computer scientists and mathematicians really understands what's going on. That's not sustainable imo.

Also although fraud is possible with paper ballots, it's very hard to scale.

but its also easy to scale vote validation for voters with evoting. how to you validate that your vote is counted correctly with paper voting?

You don’t, but you can validate the system as a whole. If you wish you can show up in the morning, confirm the ballot box is empty, look at the ballot box all day, follow the box out back and observe the ballots are poured onto a table, sorted in stacks and counted first electronically and then manually and see that the result is the same that shows up in the official tally. Validating that my single vote is counted correctly is worthless if the result is manipulated on the backend and it’s much harder (impossible) for any regular Joe to validate that an entire cryptographically secure voting system doesn’t manipulate the count somewhere.

> how to you validate that your vote is counted correctly with paper voting?

You go in on election day and count yourself.

That depends on who is doing the fraud and what qualifies as success. There is this weird failure mode where make-believe elections happen, they are obviously rigged, but fuck-nothing happens except people going in circles telling each other that elections were rigged. Had a shit neighbor like that.