>> 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.

I'm assuming what you're being coy about here is that the current election system hides voters' votes from them? Great, please see our entire discussion about why this is a super hard problem to solve and why it's not worth solving.

>> 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."

This is dismissive and contributes nothing. There are core differences between the Inquisition (?) and sending texts to people telling them when and where they can vote. Your argument distills to "truth wins out" and I'm saying there's lots of good evidence to the contrary.

>> 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...

I think you're trying to reason through this from your understanding and first principles, but a lot of things in life are non-intuitive, especially to non-experts. What usually happens in compulsory voting is that voters just scratch their ballots, the incidence of that is super low in Australia, it's a non-issue. You keep trying to make a link between totalitarianism and compulsory voting, but where's your evidence? Some irrelevant moralizing about the lesser evil and that Wikipedia has a criticism section on the Democracy Index (are you seriously taking issue with like, Australia being a democracy)? Is that even compulsory voting's fault (see where I said I agree compulsory voting doesn't fix everything)?

>> 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.

You should read about Lee Atwater, and while you're doing it, remember all that was 20 years ago or more, and not even state of the art today.

>> So someone exploiting this system would have to --

> I have been thinking that [pay for vote schemes] would pay the voter after reporting voting by the token they gave and can verify.

Why wouldn't every voter just do this? I'd love to get paid for the votes I was going to make anyway. This is essentially compulsory voting but with carrots rather than sticks.

>> 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.

Yes! We agree! Well, OK to be clear it can still be a problem in real small elections, but whatever.

> <token stuff>

Honestly I'm not super interested in the mechanics of the token system. I'm pretty convinced it's unworkably complicated; now we're talking about bitmaps and writing it down and blah blah blah. But I'm also convinced I can't convince you of this, so yeah.

> <ballot confidentiality vs. ballot secrecy>

Let me rehash our entire discussion, hopefully succinctly but probably not.

1. Without a list of valid voters, you can't protect against ballot box stuffing. States build such lists through voter registration. To prevent ballot box stuffing, a ballot secrecy system can link with the voter registration system, but that moots ballot secrecy because it links a ballot to an identity. You get to pick: ballot secrecy or no ballot box stuffing.

2. By not linking to a list of valid voters, ballot secrecy systems enable ballot box stuffing. This is bad, like democracy destroying bad.

3. A solution often floated is "well what if they're only a little linked", i.e. through a token or whatever indirection.

4. But here you get to pick two things: they're linked very weakly and you can't verify the total, or they're linked very strongly and you create a vote retaliation problem. It might seem like there's a middle ground or a grey area here, but it's actually a binary: either you can prove a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person or you can't.

5. OK so you pick "linked very strongly", dismissing concerns about voter intimidation and vote retaliation with "well only the voter knows their token". This isn't actually the problem! The problem is there's a database that proves a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person. The token is irrelevant, because one of the things you're worried about here is voting again the current county judge or whatever.

>> 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.

Polls are done on either side of intimidation (and misinformation) campaigns because people want to know if their spend worked and what messages were most effective, so there's a lot of ceteris paribus happening. But re: unreliability, yeah welcome to measuring sentiment, which is also what elections are. There's always unreliability, there's always a gap between the measurement and reality, etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying we shouldn't try and close the gap, I'm saying the way we do that is probably compulsory voting and enforcement of voting laws (and easy things like early voting, same day registration, making Election Day a holiday, etc.).

~~~

We're way to the right in the comment layout, so I'll end my part with this. It's clear you have strong feelings and a reasonable mental framework of how you think this stuff should work. That's cool! Voting is cool haha. I encourage you to pursue this stuff if you are in fact passionate about it. To that end, here's my advice:

- Go into this with the assumption that you're probably wrong, but you want to know exactly how

- Given that you're probably wrong, don't make it the cornerstone of anything important

- Have serious people red team it

- Start reading the literature on elections and voting

- Underestimate the social aspect of your system at your peril; people will always, always surprise you

- There is no system that can withstand a fearful or ignorant bureaucracy