Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Because in real life, it’s (relatively) easy to have both anonymity and trust. Online, it’s impossible to have both. If you want to trust that the vote numbers haven’t been tampered with, you necessarily need to know everyone who voted.
This is the fundamental problem with online voting.
It’s cute that people still believe this.
I said it’s relatively easy. Having both trust and anonymity online is significantly harder than in real life.
However, it is easier to pick one of those and have it online then in person. In real life, total anonymity is really hard. But online you can just use tor or something.
Each voter doesn’t need to know the choice made by everyone who voted. Trust is handled by the administration. The only issue online voting adds is that there could be a record tying votes to identities. So the system would have to either secure that record or detach the votes from identities after receiving.