>>11500735 (pb)

As I understand it, the watermark would be generated by using a secret known only to the government together with the unique number identifying the ballot. These two numbers would be fed into a cryptographic algorithm that would produce another number which is the digital signature.

Nobody else can produce that signature unless they know both the ballot number and the secret. The signature would be encoded as a watermark on the ballot.

That would mean that genuine ballots can be distinguished from fake ones because the fake ones won't have a watermark or will have a watermark that isn't a valid signature, because the forger won't know the secret.

All that can achieve is to prove that a ballot wasn't forged. It won't let anybody track the ballots except in the sense that the valid ballots will be recognized when they're fed into the machines that check the signature.

>>11500315 (lb) QFS Blockchain Encryption (vote ballots)

The cryptography involved is a digital signature. It proves that a specific entity signed a specific message.

In this case, the message that gets signed has to be a unique ballot identifier, and it would be signed by DHS or another government authority. That means that the signature, in the form of a watermark, would be different for different ballots, and DHS would need to know the ballot number of a ballot before they could produce the signature.

They couldn't watermark blank paper and give it to the states to use for ballots. There would be nothing to check the watermark against. The watermark needs to be unique for each ballot. If it was the same watermark for every ballot, a forger could just copy a watermark from one real ballot onto multiple fake ballots.

The minimum they could do would be to distribute paper that had a ballot number and a matching watermark and was otherwise blank.

If that happened, ballots from different states would all have a similar-looking ballot number or unique ballot identifier in the same font. I haven't seen enough ballots to know if that's true.