Not being able to vote electronically is also really weird since ballots are only paper at the edge. Yes there are downsides, just like when you mail-in you give up non-repudiation, but the fact that it's not even an option is crazy. I personally would be more than happy to give up my personal ability to vote anonymously if I meant I could just sign up for a vote.gov account at the BMV, login, vote and be done with it.
I absolutely do not want electronic voting. I legitimately believe that system would be kept behind a black box, and would be far too likely and liable to be cheated and gamed. At least with a huge stack of paper that is stored for an approved number of years there is an option for independent verification.
How about vote by email? Go to a vote.gov, fill out your ballot, it gives your a PDF you can review, you email that to your board of elections, they reply with a "got it!", and they're counted like all other mail-in ballots on election night.
Same process, just s/USPS/SMTP/. But if that's fine, why make the user jump through the email hoop? Hell, digital ballots would give you stronger guarantees for verifying your vote. Publish all the ballots publicly and base the final tally for digital votes on that public ledger. Every voter will have a code they can use to pull up their specific ballot and see that it's correct. And since the codes are public that's not actually enough to prove it was yours (yay non-repudiation).
No cryptography, no hashes, no zero trust proofs. The internet is only used to move a document from A->B and security model could be explained to the least technical person since it's a direct analogue of how you would do it IRL.
I'm convinced that people afraid of electronic voting are either hucksters that like the status quo or people who've been convinced by them.
if you're worried about voting being a black box, it already kind of is. what proof did you get that your last vote was accounted for properly? who counted it?
if you're worried about "hacking" you're not paying quite enough attention. We have secure systems that exist. At least as secure as a fuckton of snail mail managed by tens of thousands of the worlds most insecure asset, people.
I like your system. Ping me if there's ever an open codebase and I'll contribute.
The Indian system is a hybrid model - you vote through an electronic machine which also prints out a confirmatory paper vote that you can confirm through a porthole and which drops into a strongbox. In case of conflict or concerns, the paper votes can be tallied.
