[EM] A quick, dirty, and somewhat obvious method for a secret proxy ballot

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 19:28 -0500, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> The obstacle is the tradition of secret ballot, considered necessary 
> to safeguard against coercion. However, it is my suspicion that the 
> dangers of open voting in a society functioning with rule of law are 
> drastically overstated, and, indeed, the use of secret ballot may 
> allow more abuse than it prevents.

It is entirely simply to have a secret ballot by delegable proxy -
simply keep the fact that someone is a proxy a secret!  It does,
however, require some level of trust in a software counting program.

For example, give every registered voter a number.  If I wish to use
someone as a proxy, I write his number down instead of my vote.  The
computer then temporarily maps each voter to his vote choice, replaces
each proxy vote with what it ultimately counts for, and then reports the
results omitting the individual voter number/vote choice pairs.

If multiple voting machines are needed, then we can apply some simple
cryptography and encrypt the votes before they reach the counting
machine, such that they are never exposed in their readable state to the
public until they've been stripped of their voter number/vote choice
matchings.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie