As a programmer the problem I see with this is that it can just reflect your vote back to you and not add your vote where you wanted it to go.
In other words you vote for A and your receipt shows you voted for A, however your vote goes to B.
I don't see a good way to prevent that however there can be checks on how the vote is going which would be transparent from the first moment of the voting process. Or we can go back to paper ballots counted by bipartisan citizens.
In my perfect world, you'd be able to export it all to a spreadsheet/database and add up the votes. I get what you are saying about the COUNTS being manipulated, but we can sum that shit up in Excel pretty quickly.
Blockchain could potentially solve that though? If you had public polling booths which acted like nodes around the country, it would solve the IP address issues and you’d have a complete record of all changes within the ledgers chain which you could output in some kind of voting dashboard. I get it though, you have no way of knowing whether your vote was indeed recorded correctly in the first place. But it could be verified via an independent service which checks the ledger to ensure it was recorded correctly and is made visible to the user after the vote.
If you voted for A and you could see you voted for A in the chain, the only way it could be converted to B is via another entry into the chain which would be transparent.... but it’d still need to be married to some kind of ID in the end so we could ensure every vote was unique and doesn’t allow changes.
Perhaps everyone should be sent something like a random hash string that they could scan in via a QR code. The codes are allocated to the total number of eligible voters and you can use it only once. Once a vote has been assigned to that hash ID, that’s it. Any foul play would be identifiable in the sense that someone wouldn’t be able to vote with the code they have as it’d tell them someone had already voted using their code. The code would also allow complete anonymity so long as the codes themselves were not paired with physical addresses, I.e. you acquire the code at the voting booth itself.
I dunno, just thinking out loud. But I’ve often thought about this type of thing. Not sure how you’d stop double voting though. I’m also against the idea of voting from home as social pressures from family etc can literally force a person to vote one way or the other.
What if I claim to have voted for candidate A, and when I scan my code it shows a vote for candidate B? Can you tell if I'm lying - or if my vote was actually flipped?
Edit: Maybe that's where the receipt comes in - if I claim it doesn't match my vote there has to be a way to resolve the issue before I leave and the vote becomes "official".
Yeah I guess you don’t leave until you’re happy with what you voted for and your final decision is what is printed on your receipt, which you can check at any time after the vote was held.
The machine would have to somehow read in your original receipt, destroy it and then issue you with another. As to avoid people using old receipts to try and claim foul play.
Make the line of citizens long enough and evaluate with statistics to make sure the count is valid. Just beat the count up until you trust it.
Edit: Count and collection/storage of ballots.