>> And even if there were, you still wouldn't have any way of verifying that your vote was included in the count.

> How is querying the tokens used to vote what you voted, seeing your token in the list, and checking that the tokens make up the reported total not verifying it?

There can still be two separate systems: the system that has your actual vote and the system we use to determine who won the election. One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. Fundamentally, without a way to know all the possible voters and how they voted, you can't defend against that.

>> 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.

> I think it's just because it seems like something that could be solved.

Yeah but it's typical, and sorry for the bluntness here, tech arrogance--or maybe tech optimism is nicer. But either way, there's a consistent dynamic of tech people trying to solve things with tech that they really don't know a lot about. I've worked as a Democratic operative specifically on elections on the past few cycles and I'm pretty close to an expert. I'm not making an appeal to authority or anything, and I'm more than happy to talk about ways we can use tech to improve US elections, but it's just that I know these schemes are way, way more trouble than they're worth and either hinder a lot of the techniques we currently use to verify elections, or make political firestorms that make the election process even more fragile than it already is way more likely.

It's also worth saying experts get this wrong too! The Iowa caucuses in 2020 had some tech hiccups, and that's, in my opinion, because no one can make sense of a caucus. They're beyond broken, and the more you measure them the more you'll find they're 100% unreliable and indicative of nothing. We certainly shouldn't be showering the person who wins by .5% with millions of dollars of donor money and earned media.

But more broadly, it's also that elections are fundamentally messy, and the more you measure the more you find problems. Either we accept that and build solutions that accept that, or we don't and we live with constant allegations that our elections are fraudulent, courtesy of the perspective that we should be able to have 100% certainty.

> It seems to me that we have somewhat different aims. You have zeal for democracy and are willing to compromise ballot secrecy to verify the election result.

Honestly, I'm not sure what my ideal system is. I think anonymous voting is really important, but I also strongly support compulsory voting, and those two things are in direct tension. I think it's just hard to accept that elections are fuzzy measurements of sentiment and that the role of math in their verification is limited to some basic statistical analysis while the rest is process and politics.

And I think it's really easy to be nerd sniped by the verification part, when tech actually could do so much good in the process and politics part. For example, a lot of States have "wet ink" statutes that mean voter registration forms have to be signed by a literal pen. So guess what Democrats did: they built a robot that holds a pen and signs a voter registration form remotely when someone fills out a voter reg form online. Hooray for tech!

But also, that cost a lot of money and time. Wouldn't it have been easier if State legislatures just weren't assholes?

Anyway, I would say if we're gonna implement a system that costs whatever the cheapest cryptographic verification system costs, we should just fund early voting programs and law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation and misinformation. I know even that is impossible, which is depressing, but c'est la vie.