Too late to edit my own post but please s/voting booth/polling station/ in the parent. Of course every voter should have absolute privacy in the voting booth in order to rule out coercion, but the ballot storage in the polling station should be publicly verifiable.
First of all, there are fifty elections in the US (not counting territories like Puerto Rico and Guam). Each state runs its own elections separately and can decide on their procedures.
Secondly, some jurisidctions already experimented with making election days a holiday. Aside from the fact that this only affects government employees (private businesses set their work schedules at their discretion, just as they do for other holidays), this ended up decreasing turnout, because people ended up taking the previous day off, treating it as an extra-long weekend for travel or vacation.
Third, this is a moot point when most states (34/50) offer early voting, and three more vote by mail, making "election day" rather arbitrary. It's really the last date on which someone can cast their vote. Those states also include three of the four largest states, meaning that the vast majority of people in the US have the option to vote well ahead of election day.
(For the record, the states which have neither early voting nor no-excuse absentee voting are Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and New York)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/05/election-day...
That includes "shouting racial slurs" in your first link.
* Unboxing the ballot is done in public, anyone can come and watch those.
* Counting the votes is public and anyone can come and watch.
Voting on paper is dead simple, has withstood centuries of attacks, counting scales insanely well while attacks don't scale and it just takes one person to notice it and your whole plan goes south. Whereas electronic voting requires trusting black boxes, more black boxes, and understanding asymmetric cryptography.
Show up and keep showing up. Take notes. Fact check.
Over time, you'll know when the story doesn't add up.
Been there, done that. For years. It works.
If that's "too hard to fix" then there must be at least a fraction of people who don't think this is broken.
The time to fix it is right after elections.
This paper shows you know to achieve exactly that. You can vote anonymously and receive a proof that your vote was counted correctly, without ever telling anyone what that vote was. To prove that your vote was miscounted, I believe you do need to reveal who you voted for, but you can prove to the world that there was fraud.
This paper solves one of the major problems with blockchain based voting, but there are many more. I don't endorse blockchain voting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot
So I guess ballots should be anonymous. So how to do that with a blockchain. Well simply by assigning some random number or hash to the voters that no one else knows.
Perhaps it would be better to turn the vote-selling market into a publicly verifiable open market?
If I say that it would cost a buyer $10k more for me to vote yes than the highest open bid for me to vote no, that is a strong quantifiable indication of the magnitude of my opposition. I'm sure the vote-pricing data would be a gold mine for statisticians.
Of course, this would make the plutocratic oligarchy operate out in the open, officially, rather than behind the scenes with lobbying, campaign contributions, and speaking fees. Some people might find that objectionable: both those who do not want a plutocracy and those who do not want their money influence on politics to be openly known.
If you can not possibly reveal your vote (like with the ballot box) you can not sell your vote.
And that's even before we conclude the preferred candidate of the plutocratic oligraphy would actually be massively aided by being able efficiently purchase the votes of the indifferent rather than having to inefficiently purchase airtime to convince people their candidate actually has merit. (And of course they'll still be able to continue to organise their vote-buying operations through shadowy umbrella organizations to the extent they can be bothered to disguise who they want to win)
Two or more block chains. Each run by different parties. And a need for the same vote to show up on multiple blockchains to count. The voters would visit multiple websites to cast their votes which would then be verified between the various block chains, potentially by software that anyone can run on their own computer or vps. Every single person does not have to vote on multiple platform. Just enough that you can validate the voting.