The Still Secret Ballot: The Limited Privacy Cost of Transparent Election Results

arXiv:2308.04100v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: After an election, should officials release an electronic record of each ballot? The release of ballots could bolster the legitimacy of the result. But it may also facilitate vote revelation, where an analyst unravels the secret ballot by uniquely linking votes on an anonymous ballot to the voter's name and address in the public voter file. We first provide a theoretical model of how vote revelation could occur under various election-reporting regimes. Perhaps counterintuitively, releasing …

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