Because that would be easily verified, and the election would be thrown out. The attack wouldn't accomplish anything.

This is a tactic used to maintain power - delay elections indefinitely. Currently it’s happening in a number of African countries.

Undermining the credibility could therefore accomplish “everything” (the intended purpose).

Being able to sabotage elections and force a rerun might be an accomplishment for somebody.

For example a foreign entity could use this to cause confusion and undermine people's trust in elections.

I'm pretty sure if I get the election thrown out and smear my likely to win opponent as someone doing this kind of tampering it's all good.

And you think nobody would report that to the police?

Granted, but people already report ransomware to the police with little to no effect. Businesses held hostage with their entire livelihood report it and still end up paying most of the time. The resolutions come month later typically.

I'm not against the idea of trying to modernize voting or blockchain in general, but there are extremely practical and real problems that come with it which are a magnitude easier to accomplish than it is with paper ballots at the moment.

I'm sure there is a procedural medium which alleviates this but I'm not bright enough to think of it at the moment.

The effect would be to hopefully have the election rescheduled. In this case actually catching the people isn't necessary to make the attack useless because the final goal is to compromise the election which can be prevented without trying to break the ransomware or find the perpetrators at all which is why reporting it to the police usually does nothing. Also the stakes are a lot higher than the usual ransomware so unless the government itself is trying to break the election the police have a much large incentive to get involved.