> we should be pushing for electronic voting systems (not shitty ones, but truly great ones)

Experts in electronic voting systems are discouraging the use of this technology for high stake elections, even with state-of-the-art schemes: https://www.belenios.org/faq.html

Right, by "pushing for" I mean we should be taking the academic discussion into the engineering realm to make it a reality. AFAIK there is no existing off the shelf product that satisfies the requirements.

One example that is working on such a thing is: https://voting.works/

> There are crypto voting systems that do not allow anyone (including the government) to know if you voted or what your vote is (identifying you), but still allows tallying and validation.

Are they safe against "rubber hose cryptanalysis"? Such as forcing you to verify your vote while I can see you?

I’m not an expert, but couldn’t you keep a link between your public key and your vote while the election is open. Allow subsequent votes that will nullify votes associated with your public key. And when the polls close, this link gets deleted.

This way you can be intimidated to vote and verify a certain way, then after your intimidator leaves you alone, you simply cast another vote. And after the deadline passes any record that you personally casted a ballot have been erased.

Maybe as a further safeguard keep traditional in-person polling open, wherein showing up to you automatically nullify you previous crypto vote, and only your paper ballot counts.

There's still the problem that you can still coerce and verify then use surveillance and the fear of surveillance to keep people from changing their vote. Random rechecks the day the polls close would keep a lot of people from risking changing their vote after the initial check-in.

Even beyond any theoretical security measures one huge benefit of in person voting is it limits the available attack. With IPV to steal an election you have to find a way to either physically bring enough people to enough polling places to swing the election or corrupt the poll watcher system and steal it in the counting phase. With electronic voting anyone in the world has a chance to attack you. Anything that requires Joe/Jane Citizen to reliably or securely operate their computer is kind of doomed for a long time IMO.

I do think that voting should be as streamlined and easy as possible. If electronic voting becomes a thing, you should still be able to do an in-person voting at a poll both on election day, an in-person absentee voting at a designated place, a mail-in absentee voting, etc. in addition to the e-voting.

All of these (except for in-person voting on election day) should have a sealed timestamp and a public key/barcode attached so previous ballots can be nullified with a more recent vote by an other—or the same—means.

The problem with being able to go back and revote/nullify is it makes counting very complicated to do with non-attrubution.

idk. It is already done quite successfully in many democracies, including Iceland and Estonia.

I’m guessing the vote is sealed with a key or a barcode, if a later vote arrives, a system will order a previous vote with a matching key/barcode to be destroyed. Finally on voting day, the link between any personally identifiable information is destroyed.

EDIT: Just to clarify, there should never be a time when a ballot is unsealed and a link between a barcode and a person exists in the system. A counter scans an absentee ballot before unsealing it, if the person voted in-person the scanner should reject the vote and order it to be destroyed the link could have been destroyed at any point between then and when the person showed up to the polling station. If they didn’t show up, the scanner will order the link to be destroyed, the counter will then pass this ballot on to be counted. Importantly the counter (nor any human for that matter) never has access to a link to a personally identifiable information, all the counter sees is the barcode.

EDIT 2: I don’t know if this is how counting is done in democracies that allow you to nullify a previous vote by voting again, but it is a system that could work, conjured up by a mere spectator.

That probably works better for smaller countries. Here in the US mail in voting kind of works that way in that the ballots are sealed until they're 'accepted' and then the ballots are removed and the identifying shell envelope is discarded. The big slow down is actually going through all the submitted votes and validating then counting, most in person votes here in the US are counted via machine immediately at the polling place.

Somewhere between 25-50% of votes depending on state are cast through some early mechanism and under this none of those could be counted until election day which is a large increase in the number of votes that need to be counted and makes them more difficult to count.

One other benefit of being able to count everything in person on the day it's cast is the votes don't have to move outside the polling place for initial counting which makes monitoring easier.

It's a nice and convenient idea but I don't see the small benefit of being able to change votes (how many people honestly want to change their vote?) vs the large increase in complexity.

Like previously stated being able to change the vote is crucial to limit the effectiveness of voter intimidation. You simply vote however your intimidator orders you, and then you change your vote afterwards.

It also has the benefits of allowing voters who in absentee vote early for a candidate that later drops out (i.e. Washington State voters who voted for Elizabeth Warren) to correct their vote based on this new information.

Regarding monitoring. Mail in ballots are sent to the polling place on election night for counting. They are counted just like any other ballots and can be monitored as easily as in-person ballots. I suppose e-votes could as easily be printed out and counted in the same place.

The voter intimidation problem only really comes out of adopting a new system where you can check your vote to begin with though.. Our current system only really suffers from that even being a possibility with mail in votes.

> It also has the benefits of allowing voters who in absentee vote early for a candidate that later drops out (i.e. Washington State voters who voted for Elizabeth Warren) to correct their vote based on this new information.

Maybe for a primary it's a useful feature but there are simpler options like ranked choice that could be used to do that. Though there are still uses for votes to people who are out of the race because it gives them voting power at the convention if there's not a decisive winner.

Also if we're letting things change that much primaries are never really over in a state. One of the reason for sequential primaries is that it lets smaller campaigns have a chance because they don't have to compete everywhere at once.

No cryptographic system can be resistant to this by itself, but the attack can be trivially defeated by keeping the existing concept of polling stations and having people cast their cryptographically-verifiable votes there.

>* General self defense (fitness, martial arts, firearms training)

The first two are relatively non-controversial, but also won't do much against security forces with tear gas and rubber bullets. I suspect the last would be controversial in the US as gun control/ownership is a very polarized issue.

Martial arts goes a lot further than I think most people realize. You gain pain tolerance, bodily self control, and a greatly increased awareness of your vitals and physical limits.

In the protests where you see people covering tear gas canisters with cones or hurling them back, more likely than not those are martial artists or other athletes who train regularly. Your ability to act decisively and correctly in a scary environment greatly improves.

I don't think the problem with Belarus is the lack of these but rather of external forces. Russia thinks that Belarus belongs to its control; and a democratic system will most certainly be US-friendly.

This is hardly a citizen revolt against dictatorship and is one of the several proxy-war these two guys (US/Russia) are playing worldwide.

It's a lot harder to kidnap citizens when they are armed and surrounded by other armed citizens, especially if all of those citizens have substantial firearms training.

I endorse bringing guns to peaceful protests in a state where unmarked officials are kidnapping people in broad daylight. That is exactly the sort of reason that the right to bear arms is planted deep within our constitutional rights.

It completely boggles my mind that comments like these don’t get any pushback on HN. This insinuation that every citizen should own firearms just in case the state goes rouge is militant, irresponsible, and hilariously naive. A bunch of armchair freedom fighters who have no idea of the consequences of war think that their shiny “tactical” AR15 is going to stop a tank..

Let me ask you a direct question. Are you advocating for a full on civil war in Belarus in the middle of Europe? If a Belorussian read your comment, got a gun and killed a bunch of policemen/government supporters/Russians would you be content?

Don’t take this as a personal attack. I just think comments like yours are irresponsible given that the people of Belarus themselves chose the path of nonviolent resistance and protest - maybe they don’t want their country to end up like Ukraine or Syria.

What is worse, is that if someone insinuated on this site that for example people in the US should buy guns and start shooting policemen when they think that the police are oppressing them all kinds of voices would drum up and shut that down. I guess inciting violence in one of those “shithole countries” is ok, but god forbid if that kind of stuff happens in your own country.

A look from behind the southern border of Belarus: in 2014, Ukraine had had peaceful protests for more than two months before street violence started and ended. Then Crimea was annexed. Then the separatist war started, where most of weapons on the separatist side were supplied by Russia. Ukraine is a country with the same post-Soviet culture of "whoever owns weapons is suspicious", just like Belarus.

My point is that you don't "end up like Ukraine or Syria" by your own choice, and Belarus's only choice may well be between a "civil" war (i.e. proxy war with Russians) or being bent by Lukashenko to submit. I still hope that Belorusians will make it peacefully (Belarus is smaller and more unified than Ukraine), but I am afraid that it's not up to Belarusians to decide as long as Russia has the influence it has there.

> A bunch of armchair freedom fighters who have no idea of the consequences of war think that their shiny “tactical” AR15 is going to stop a tank.

This presupposes that the military will go along with firing on their fellow citizens. That was the case in Syria, but it's far from clear that American troops would do likewise — recent polling suggests that the U.S. military is getting tired of the current regime, er, administration. [0]

[0] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/08...

Yeah, arming the people worked really well for Syria and Lybia.

It is true that Russia has a lot of control over Belarus, but it is revolt against dictator. There is no talks about ceasing partnership with Russia simply because the country is too relying on Russia's market. The idea that people want to get rid of dictator to get away from the Russia is what is pushed by Belarus state propaganda media precisely to push Russia to support dictator.

If you're a Russian autocrat, you're probably terrified of a "color revolution" challenging your control over what you view as Russian territory. If people there get to make their own choices, they might do what the Baltic states did and align with the West.

The very idea of democracy threatens the power structure.