It's not enough for elections to be verifiable. They need to be easily verifiable by anybody.

Blockchains may be theoretically secure. But almost nobody is in a position to understand this thoroughly. The debacle around the DAO and frequent hacks of online wallets, even if those events are only tangentially related to blockchain technology, also undermine any potential trust.

It's also unnecessary: I just witnessed the federal election in Germany. In large cities, there's a polling place on every second block or so, each serving maybe 500 voters. The polling place is open to the public. Meaning you can see that the ballot box is empty in the morning, you can watch all day, and after polls close, you are free to watch the poll workers sort and count the ballots, as close as you want. You can then compare the count you witnessed to the official numbers posted online.

The whole process is end-to-end verifiable by anybody, and it requires no special skills other than counting.

A Dutch blog (geenstijl.nl) has used this to organise a initiative to count the votes for the 2014 European parlement elections, because the results only were to be announced days later. They had 1378 people sending in the results they got by waiting for the results in polling stations. And with those results they were able to make a very accurate exit poll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeenPeil#First_initiative_2014

Blockchain is not necessarily the only answer for everything. The important thing is that the voting scheme is end-to-end verifiable. Even paper would work, although less efficiently. But there are plenty of other technical solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

How would blockchain help this in the least?

Paper ballots work really well too, and though they can go missing just like files get deleted, it's pretty easy to see that.

Blockchain would definitely solve this: Traceability, verifiability (no double casting). If you dont trust the counters (which no1 in america should) you can also use a form of Secure Multiparty Computation to hide the outcome from the counters until the last ballot is cast. So ya.

> you can also use a form of Secure Multiparty Computation to hide the outcome from the counters until the last ballot is cast

That sounds like a terrible idea. What happens when somebody tries to hold the election process hostage by not casting a vote?

That will never happen because voting happens during a finite window of time.