> It's a database of votes and tokens used to cast them. You could also query what tokens were used to vote X and check that they make up the total. You could see the token you used on the list of Y you voted.

Not everyone will use a token or remember it. If even 50% of voters do this 100% accurately, it still isn't statistically helpful.

> It's one thing to remember what you voted a few days after the election, and another to remember it months later when polled, which is what [1] is about.

Maybe, but to me it's about the frailty of memory, and the US has a lot of elections. They won't remember who they voted for for State House/Senate, Judge, Sheriff, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, etc. Ballots are also complicated; maybe your vote for US Representative counted, but you goofed on Mayor and it didn't. You might look up your vote and think "shenanigans!", and there won't be any way of looking at your original ballot to find out what happened. And even if there were, you still wouldn't have any way of verifying that your vote was included in the count.

It's also worth saying that if there's any problem with this system, it calls the entire election into question, even if the election itself was fine or statistically far from error.

> Btw, this system sort of exists already in countries where you write the candidate's name or number on the ballot, and ballots are publicly available for recounting; the token is your handwriting. It just isn't anonymous as someone else could also recognise it.

Sure and I can see your system as an anonymized upgrade of it. But again, because you can't audit the count and there's a wide gulf between the votes you can audit and the count, it doesn't move us closer to the goal of verifying an election.

Continuing down the path of existing election systems, there is of course the recount system. So for most elections where it might make a difference, recounts go through all the ballots meticulously with party representatives, government officials, and lawyers present. Barring things like SCOTUS interference, these processes are really good, oftentimes finding more votes, curing lots and lots of ballots, and contributing to the corpus of wacky ballot analysis (counties get to design ballots and, wow, they could use some assistance).

Which is to say, we already have a system that maps voters to votes, audited by elected officials, legal officials, and partisan representatives. Whenever there's any question, we activate that system that has maximum information in order to verify an election result. Cryptography only muddles this system--perhaps hopelessly.

> This system is meant to increase public confidence in the election result. Wouldn't you think it worth a few millions, considering the aftermath of 2020 elections?

This is a great topic change! We (especially in tech) focus myopically on election fraud in the US, as though that's the thing that would undermine the legitimacy of an election. But the incidence of that is basically nil, and doesn't merit any effort to improve. The current hullabaloo (which is an inflated case of the going hullabaloo) comes from Republican leaders gaslighting Americans in order to cling to power. I am 100% sure that even if we implemented this system, they would still work just as hard to undermine election legitimacy. It's not a tech problem.

If we want to make our elections more legitimate, we need to make them simpler, cheaper, and more accessible. Policies that do this include: early voting, same day registration, mail voting, compulsory voting, election day holidays, mandated time off to vote, adequate polling place capacity, non-partisan districting boards, and enforced laws about voter intimidation and misinformation. Or, even something as simple as common ballot design would help a lot of older voters and voters with low levels of literacy.

But to wrap up: I think we'd both like to increase the legitimacy of elections, but spending resources (whether that's time, money, or something more abstract like system complexity or fragility) on a cryptographic vote verification system is misguided because the US doesn't have fraudulent or incorrect election results, and there are no elections where such a system would have done better than the existing recount system. On the other hand, decades of political science study has discovered and reaffirmed time and time again that some simple policies would go a long way towards fixing:

- bonkers disenfranchisement (via gerrymandering, intimidation, class-based barriers like long lines, etc.) rendering our representation completely non-descriptive (in terms of race, sex, gender, politics, immigrant status, ethnicity, sexual preference, class, you name it)

- the majority of our representative bodies being elected with wildly meager portions of the vote, or highly partisan sections of the vote (in the case of very partisan districting), or both

These are the things that truly threaten the legitimacy of our elections.