Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

Thanks for pointing out another vulnerability of in-person voting that mail-in voting doesn't have, due to its distributed nature.

Chain voting is something that's only practical to organize when everyone in the group is voting at the same place and at the same time, so the chain doesn't need to be coordinated in advance.

As long as people know what kind of guy to look for outside, they know there's quick money to be made.

Good luck coordinating a vote buying scheme with enough people to skew the vote by mail without anyone finding out.

>With remote voting, nobody can check that people is alone when voting.

Neither can any other system of voting, including in-person voting.

And if the person is truly on their own in the room, and they truly only have one ballot... they can snap a picture of their ballot to show how they voted.

The problem isn't "being alone" when voting, the problem is buying votes - and it's solved by going after the money in any case.

With chain voting, the schemers also have no way to verify that their pre-filled ballot was actually used (and didn't go into the trash bin). It works because the voters themselves are corrupt and lying to the state, but honest to the people who pay them - in which case the voting system is neither the problem nor the solution.

1. We need a sort of blockchain system to make sure nobody can change votes later.

2. Every citizen can deposit their vote with their own key tied to their id number that nobody else has. Everyone should be able to look up their own vote via their key.

3. We need more proof of work, require every booth to record a video of the voter and have a unique physical marker so that the video cant be reused and require voters to write something specific to that location during their video.

4. Proof of location? Require voters to transmit their GPS at all times during the entire election day. Then at least group voting (beyond faking your own family members' votes perhaps) should be impossible and multi voting should also be impossible.

4. Make sure that the counting of ballots is instantaneous so that the cheaters have less room to cheat.

5. Proof of time? Surely we should be able to simply use time to our advantage, given that somebody who wants to cheat on a mass scale inherently has less time than the individual voters?

Maybe all of it together, we have so much data about citizens in most countries. It should be absurdly easy to have a citizen be forced via GPS to vote from his area or even his building where he is registered to live before he starts going to his local voting booth. This would give us a lot of confidence that this is really a separate, real person and also the person in question.

We need to use what we have to our advantage. People may be able to fake a lot of things but all of them? I rather trust a complex system like this than literal pieces of paper where any person with a bad mind can just choose to read it differently or stuff a few extra pieces of paper somewhere.

How many expert do we need? Do we need cross-domain experts to check if any domain experts missing anything between the gaps?

For paper voting, it is literally just check the box is empty before voting and nobody get near the box unexpectedly

Cryptography. Your receipt is presumably only valid for yourself. So if you got someone else's receipt, it wouldn't be valid for you.

I support paper voting for political elections for most of the reasons you mentioned, but I don't think that automatically makes all arguments for paper voting good and valid, and all arguments for alternative voting systems null and void.

And even if political elections are better done on paper, there's plenty of other elections (eg in companies and clubs etc) with different requirements and threats, and they might benefit from the research and experimentation.