Yesterday we had a lecture about voter verification. In short, you go vote, you get a receipt, there’s some anonymizing action going on the background and something that matches your receipt shows up on a public bulletin board. You compare and what you get is the knowledge that your vote was counted.
Now, I contend that this whole thing is purely academic since it simply isn’t practical.
First, people don’t care if their vote was counted if they don’t know who it was counted for! This is at-least what I believe, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think any significant portion of the population would even check their receipts without having confirmation that their vote got to where they intended. Researchers should come up with a mechanism to achieve that by still voting anonymously. Sure, it’s tough, but anything less wouldn’t cut it. (I’m sure there are suggestions for this out there… one that I thought of is displaying a secret to the voters in the booth for them to remember. When they get home they see a 100 outcomes and can see their vote and still point to another outcome for Jimmy that payed them $20 to vote for Johnny.)
Second, any system wouldn’t prevent coercion in the way of bribery. There will always be simple ways to circumvent the technological mechanism by exploiting human nature. Some people cheat; one can only hope that in elections the signal overcomes the noise.