Voter enclave

A voter enclave (VE) is a way of providing the following features within a voting system:

• external verification ("were all these votes cast by real voters?")
• internal verification ("was my vote correctly added to the total?")
• preservation of public vote anonymity (the public at large cannot determine how any individual voted)

New problems will likely crop up within this system, but it provides a new structure which hopefully will suggest solutions.

The Rules

• self-grouping: Any group of people of any size may create a VE, and register it with the government.
• single-vote: Every voter joins exactly one VE, and registers their membership with the government.
• In an election:
  • Voters may see the votes of all others in the VE, in order to verify that the VE is reporting the correct totals.
  • The lists of VE totals (but not the individual votes) are available in a public database, so the public can verify that the final vote represents an accurate summing of the individual VE totals.

How It Works

Self-grouping is important because:

• It means that voters are free to only reveal their votes to others they trust, thus preventing individual targeting by hostiles.
• It minimizes corruption within the VEs, as voters can freely change to (or form) another VE if they don't like the way their current VE is doing things.

Possible Problems

• Since VEs will tend to consist of like-minded people, mostly in small groups, hostiles might target everyone in the VEs they don't like.
  • Solution: Keep member-lists private -- only the government has them. Hostiles will not know any individuals to target.
  • solution: Allow VEs to partner with others and aggregate their votes. The same mechanisms will work at any number of levels. This limits the reach of information about where hostile-disapproved votes are coming from.