Political Memes

Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.

What if you lose a job because of the way you voted?

In some sense that'd be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who'd do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.

If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.

There's another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it'd be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it'd be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.

And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.

EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.

It's a huge problem in today's world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who's considered the victim and the good guy and who's the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.

Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.

And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who "testified" before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I'm not mistaken.

So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.