> Not to be snippy here but, whoever wrote the Bible clearly lived in an era before Fox News and conservative talk radio. They are anything but afraid.

The point is that trying to control what others may say, see or hear is suspicious. That's what the whole paragraph is about. It would likely hurt your cause.

> > Generally I think the most effective way to combat misinformation is spreading correct information and trusting that people can discern the truth.

> Democrats and non-partisan organizations spend millions of dollars trying this, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions of dollars to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of misinformation in general as a crisis.

If you can't win that way, your chances are slim no matter what you do. Btw, you can change a few words and get what Papists probably thought
when people began reading the Bible: "The Inquisition spends millions to root out heresy, and it definitely isn't keeping up.
Other problems that require millions to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of heresy in general as a crisis."

> Your other counter arguments are essentially: compulsory voting doesn't fix everything. Fortunately for me, that's not my claim.

Hiding indifference and possible demand for fresh ideas is detrimental. People don't get involved in new political movements if it seems that almost everybody
is content to vote the status quo. And that's what it would seems like: you need to fill ballot anyway so you try to at least pick the least evil.

> Here are the Democracy Index scores of the countries they list (I've omitted 3 micro-states and 3 cities):

Wikipedia has a criticism section on Democracy Index that reads:
"Investment analyst Peter Tasker has criticised the Democracy Index for lacking transparency and accountability beyond the numbers."
It may be based on gut feelings of unnamed experts. Compulsory voting may have fooled them to some extent.

Beside this I'm going to just ignore it as I never meant that the list would predict their standing in some ranking.
Just that it didn't change how I view compulsory voting, but it did change my views of countries on the list (when it was new to me).

> If you believe there are organizations out there that would pay for votes, why don't you believe there are organizations that would pay people to do this?

I expect that making a fool of oneself publicly and taking the risk of the conspiracy being exposed, would cost a lot more than a vote.

> So someone exploiting this system would have to --

You seem to think of a scenario where the buyers have a list of bribed voters and tokens they should use. Such a list would be highly suspicious if discovered.
I have been thinking that they would pay the voter after reporting voting by the token they gave and can verify.

> The reason people don't do it isn't because it's unverifiable, it's because it's impossible to keep secret at the scale where it would matter, and you go to jail if you try.

That reminds me of something I read from a detective: the difficulty of concealing a conspiracy increases as more people get involved.
In that case vote buying isn't a problem at all.

> How do people get tokens? Don't they have to be unique? You can't just scratch a token in there because you might pick a non-unique one, tanking the whole system.

The token space should be large enough to make collisions unlikely.
Recording the polling station used to cast the vote would limit the uniqueness requirement to that station, but it isn't as difficult as it sounds.

There are over 500 trillion (2*49) unique 7x7 bitmaps. Chances are that 16 million such tokens randomly generated are all unique.
The number of 9x9 bitmaps is 2*81, and a trillion random ones are likely all unique.

> (or they might put identifiable information in there)

It's their choice.

> I can also imagine all kinds of extra guidance you'd have to give like "don't use the same token across multiple elections because then a corrupt mayor can see that you really do check your number" or whatever else.

People could search their own from a table of votes cast on a particular polling station without revealing which is their own.
Also people that need a new token would check that nobody used their new token.

> I think this system has some serious logistics to plan out.

Right now it's just an idea.

> But more broadly, I think you wildly overestimate how much voters are able and willing to do any of this.

If you settle for ballot confidentiality, you have more options for verifying results.
But if you insist on ballot secrecy - which many countries do - only the voters themselves can verify the results.

> You keep tacking on tactics voters can employ to attempt to foil corruption, effectively asking more of voters to solve a non-existent problem.

If the problem is non-existent, voters need not solve it. My scheme just aims to give them a way to solve it if they really want to.

> We already have ballot secrecy and we still have bonkers voter intimidation.

What you have is ballot confidentiality, if, as you said earlier, you have "a system that maps voters to votes".

> (it's actually almost impossible to do this)

It depends on how well they know each other.

> to suppress the votes of people who vote Democrat (way) more likely than not.

That's either based on (unreliable) polling data, or actual votes of those the intimidators failed to turn away.
Those that they managed to intimidate could have voted differently.