[Cryptography] Questions about crypto that lay people want to understand

[Christian Huitema]

> 
> For voting, another reason for doing it in person by yourself is to make it
> harder for anyone else to coerce your vote.  We realize that in places like
> Oregon that do vote by mail, they either don't understand or don't care
> about this threat.

Same in Washington. Vote by mail, using machine readable forms. 

The coercion threat can most probably be mitigated without using fancy crypto. To work and actually change results, coercion has to affect a large enough number of votes. But large enough also means "easy to find out." The probability that "nobody speaks" decreases exponentially with the number of parties involved...

After that, it is a legal and political process, the outcome of which depends mostly on the local political culture. 

-- Christian Huitema