Comment Re:Concerns about online voting (Score 1) 139
I agree with your concerns about selling your vote. But I do think it's possible to design a system that makes vote-selling worthless, though it would be less convenient than normal online voting, and would still involve some physical visits to the voting booth, just not as often. Basically, every N years you would visit the voting locales in person and draw any number of random numbers on slips of paper or similar. You choose one of these random numbers and copy it to a new slip of paper which you put in a sealed envelope and submit just like you would during normal physical voting. That random number is now a pseudonym that can be used to submit online votes for the next period. The other numbers are basically decoys to make selling such numbers harder.
When voting online with this, each vote would be signed with the same number. Crucially, the same response would be given no matter whether the number matches a registered one or not: "your vote has been received" or similar. If somebody is looking over your shoulder, you can just type a wrong code, and your vote will be invalid, but look just as correct to the person observing you.
Since you can draw an arbitrary number of random numbers in the voting locale, but only one is correct, selling these numbers should be worthless too, since you have no way of proving that the number you're selling is the one you actually registered, and a buyer can't ask for "all of them" because he can't know how many numbers you got. Though.. people are lazy, so many people would only keep the one they actually used, I guess.
Of course, this doesn't do anything to solve the problem of botnets etc., which I think is a scary problem, which could put a lot of political power in the hands of botnet operators and those who buy their services.