The great Freakonom, Steven Levitt, argues that the market price of vote selling is effectively zero because of its essentially insignificant weighting in the outcome.

Of course I agree entirely with Ben Adida’s take: the price is effectively zero because the transaction cannot be verified as having been fulfilled.

The design of E2E receipts completely revolves around this idea, and we spend a lot of time on it. It’s also why E2E voting via the internet is such a hard nut to crack.How can you possibly enforce ballot secrecy in that environment? How can you even enforce it in a polling place?

There is another dimension to it that I wanted to talk about.

If you already have a law against vote selling, do you really need the additional enforcement mechanism (booths, envelopes, etc) at the polling place?

Many other criminal laws do not lean on an additional physical protection measure to prevent the crime; being caught and punished is enough.

There’s no particular physical measure preventing someone from robbing someone of $10 (the minimum bid of the ebay vote selling incident), presumably just the risk of a jail term.

Consider a related situation. In Canada (obviously where there is no HAVA) you can assist someone in voting as long as you sign a statutory declaration that you won’t tell anyone how that person voted. The idea being, yes, you could do it, but you have the legal incentive not to, especially that you’re on record. The Crown probably couldn’t even prove the offense in most situations. And yet this measure seems to be effective enough that no cases come to mind.

You can also (again via a statutory declaration) vote at a polling place without being on the voter list. Presumably you just could go around from poll to poll casting ballots. But it’s ultimately the ‘lawonomics’ — the cost of going to jail weighed against the benefit of stuffing 3 or 4 ballots — that seems to prevent this.

We will be presenting Scantegrity II at the 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop. Here’s the abstract of our paper:

Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes

by David Chaum, Richard Carback, Jeremy Clark, Aleksander Essex, Stefan Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Emily Shen, and Alan T. Sherman

We introduce Scantegrity II, a practical enhancement for optical scan voting systems that achieves increased election integrity through the novel use of confirmation codes
printed on ballots in invisible ink. Voters mark ballots just as in conventional optical scan but using a special pen that develops the invisible ink. Verifiability of election integrity is end-to-end, allowing voters to check that their votes are correctly included (without revealing their votes) and allowing anyone to check that the tally is computed correctly from the included votes. Unlike in the original Scantegrity, dispute resolution neither relies on paper chits nor requires election officials to recover particular ballot forms. Scantegrity II works with either precinct-based or central scan systems. The basic system has been implemented in open-source Java with off-the-shelf printing equipment and has been tested in a small election.

An enhancement to Scantegrity II keeps ballot identification and other unique information that is revealed to the voter in the booth from being learned by persons other than the voter. This modification achieves privacy that is essentially equivalent to that of ordinary paper ballot systems, allowing manual counting and recounting of ballots.