this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
130 points (93.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

42094 readers
922 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago (6 children)

All votes really need a numbered receipt, like a tracking number, that shows what that number voted for, and then posted publicly. This way if you think you're vote was changed you can go and look online to see if it matches how you voted...but doubt this would ever be put in place.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't think that's a good idea at all. Leaks happen all the time and everyone knows that a lot of those machines are compromised. If republicans know exactly who voted for who, that could be an Alligator Auschwitz trip for certain people.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The problem is, that it's either a system with checks or you get a system with no checks and potential fraud.

This would still be anonymous, you vote, it prints out a ticket number just for you not assigned to anyone but the votes that have been cast. You walk out of the voting booth with a ticket that has a number assigned to the votes nothing more.

[–] garbagebagel@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I was thinking if it's just a ballot that has a number but it's not attached to your name. I.e. if the person handing out the ballots gives you a random one and you're the only one who knows your own number. I've never used electric voting machines but maybe a randomly generated number that you can know but nobody else would know?

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

The problem with any kind of system like this is that if you can verify your own vote, then someone else could always force you to show them that verification.

Relevant XKCD

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's illegal in most places. Votes are anonymous specifically on purpose. Numerous people have been threatened to vote certain ways in the past all over the world. If there is no record of you specifically voting a specific choice, you can't be forced to vote a specific way. And you can't be targeted after the fact for that vote.

[–] thefactremains@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also because it's an effective way to prove you voted a certain way to a vote buyer.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What's stopping this now? Vote buying would happen regardless of a system.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

when votes are anonymous you can just not give a fuck about what they paid you to vote, you can take as many bribes as you want and vote for yourself regardless, thus people don't really bother buying votes.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 0 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Musk literally bought peoples votes...there are plenty of people who have no morals and absolutely would vote how they're paid.

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

we can’t really know that… musk paid people to vote, but we and he have no idea if people actually voted how he wanted

i’d say selection bias (people willing to engage) played more of a part than actually telling people how to vote

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The turnip won. It definitely helped

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

nobody can say that for sure… republicans still support him, people protest voted, kamala was unexciting… there are so many reasons that probably contributed

i’d guess his campaign probably got some people to vote when they otherwise wouldn’t have, but i’m not sure it would’ve changed anyone’s vote

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago

You can pay someone to vote a specific way, but with the current system, there doesn't exist a way for you to verify that they actually voted how you told them to.

[–] Maestro@fedia.io 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That is a bad idea because now someone else can also check how you've voted. I.e. you can be coerced or threatened to vote a certain way. The current system is anonymous. You can vote X but say you voted Y and nobody can prove different.

[–] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

The idea of it being numbered is that you are given your number when you vote to check against later, but nobody else is given that number so they can't tie the vote to you.

[–] nieminen@lemmy.world 13 points 23 hours ago (11 children)

Often times the people this would hurt most would be the spouses of abusive individuals. They could force the receipt, and would be able to confirm their victim voted the way they were told.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] Maestro@fedia.io 12 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

But you can be coerced to give up that number. People can buy your vote and you can give them your number as proof. That's a huuuuge problem. You should not be able to prove (to someone else) how you voted. Ever.

What you need is some kind of systeem that allows you to verify your vote, but which is useless to someone else. It's probably possible. But your idea isn't it.

[–] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 2 points 23 hours ago

Transparent urn and public counting ?

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

You could literally just throw it away and then they wouldn't be able to do anything. If someone is threatening you to vote a certain way and they're doing this to enough people that it makes a change.... we've got much bigger problems than vote tracking.

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 9 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

This is the exact use-case for a blockchain, a public immutable ledger where you can validate your vote, but nobody can tie it back to you.

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

the point of anonymous voting is coercion. if you can validate your vote outside of a safe polling place then someone else is able to validate how you voted and force you to vote a particular way

voting systems you need to be able to validate that your vote is submitted as you wanted (imo only paper based voting allows for this), and then that the system for counting the votes is inviolable (that’s where scrutineers come in)… again, imo that’s not something you can do electronically - or at least practically

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 0 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Can't we be coerced to get in our car, drive to a polling place, and vote for a particular candidate? Blackmail, other threats, or financial incentives etc, I'm not sure why a physical polling place is safer than being able to vote anonymously

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

No matter who threatens you, they can't see what's on the paper ballot you put in a box. There's people at the polling station that ensure that.

If there's any way of tracking your vote, someone could threaten you, force you to vote a certain way, then force you to show the verification afterwards.

The safest way to ensure everyone gets a fair vote is paper ballots in a box.

I know the US uses a lot of mail-in voting, and that you generally deem it to be secure. I also understand that the US is a far less densely populated country than my own, which makes mail-in voting more necessary. However, we don't have that in my country, and the reason I'm glad for it is exactly this: There's no truly effective way to prevent anyone from forcing someone else to mail in a specific vote.

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com -1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 1 points 1 hour ago

I appreciate you sharing your insight and knowledge, honestly, I'm grateful

I'm stubborn and hard to convince, is what i meant

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 3 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

In your home, someone could force themselves in, force you to vote for someone and verify you did so.

With anonymous voting at a polling place, sure someone could force you to go there, but since the vote itself is anonymous (and there's people around to check it is), they would never be able to verify that you indeed voted X or Y way. It's also why most countries ban taking pictures of your vote; no proving to anyone how you voted!

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

You're forgetting about the traffic analysis and key distribution problems

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

No different than how it's recorded today. We can improve from there but it's not worse with the upside of a public ledger.

[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 1 points 17 hours ago

You can do much better than a ledger with a commitment scheme and transparency log.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Could this be done such that a person cannot prove that they voted a certain way (the source of the problems people mention, like vote selling becoming viable)?

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Maybe with a schema that allows a one time verify, and then churns your entry. If that verify occurs upon entry synchronously at the time you vote, if possible, that'd be no less safe than the paper ballot you feed into the machine.

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

No one seems to be understanding that your system doesn’t make who you vote for public…

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

Yea... I'm kinda seeing that. It's not a hard concept lol it's a paper receipt. Toss it away if you're worried about it.

[–] Hegar@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Under your system republicans would just send everyone who voted democrat to death camps.

At least with a secret ballot they can only do that to everyone they think voted against them.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Under this system, the votes are tied to a randomized number, not to a person. They wouldn't know.

[–] Hegar@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think that's how a technofascist surveillance state works. They would know.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

If you're at that point then what makes you think they're not using facial surveillance to watch how you vote? And worse is mail in ballots.