I think you're saying that you don't understand how mixnets guarantee integrity -- if that's incorrect, I apologize. Mixnets allow you to verify that the data in is _identical_ to data out (modulo the salts) that serve an anonymize the data. It isn't just reproducible, but verifiable. The results coming out the other end are the final decrypted ballots which anyone can count and verify the totals.
You can't know which final ballot was your vote, but you can know that your ballot was in the mix coming in, and that the mix going out wasn't altered (within some probabilistic bounds).
Mixnets allow you to verify that the data in is _identical_ to data out (modulo the salts) to make it so that data an anonymized.
I think this is the part I don't understand. Partly because I don't know anything about mixnets, and it feels like its paradoxical. But if that's how it is, then I can accept it.
Not OP, but that helped me at least, so thank you. The description of the mixnet seems a bit similar to the way Tor anonymizes where requests come. What I'm not clear on is how a voter can know that the mixnet is working correctly. I.e. I understand how the voter can verify that their second bubble from the top was recorded, but can they also verify that that was correctly counted as a vote for John Jackson?
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I think you're saying that you don't understand how mixnets guarantee integrity -- if that's incorrect, I apologize. Mixnets allow you to verify that the data in is _identical_ to data out (modulo the salts) that serve an anonymize the data. It isn't just reproducible, but verifiable. The results coming out the other end are the final decrypted ballots which anyone can count and verify the totals.
You can't know which final ballot was your vote, but you can know that your ballot was in the mix coming in, and that the mix going out wasn't altered (within some probabilistic bounds).
I think this is the part I don't understand. Partly because I don't know anything about mixnets, and it feels like its paradoxical. But if that's how it is, then I can accept it.
Not OP, but that helped me at least, so thank you. The description of the mixnet seems a bit similar to the way Tor anonymizes where requests come. What I'm not clear on is how a voter can know that the mixnet is working correctly. I.e. I understand how the voter can verify that their second bubble from the top was recorded, but can they also verify that that was correctly counted as a vote for John Jackson?