Unless your device is compromised.

> Either way, someone can theoretically forge your signature.

They could forge your signature, but to be effective, they need to forge thousands of signatures.

> You don’t have to get a list of those who didn’t vote. You just take the pile of punched ballots or whatever and replace them with your pile.

No, the ballots all have unique numbers and the list of numbers is stored separately. You'd have to buy off all the poll workers to pull that off, and you'd have to reconstruct all the records to match your fake ballots.

> All the matching of counts etc. can be done electronically too.

Sure it can be, but not securely, and security (and integrity) is the number one goal of a voting system. Convenience and speed are secondary.

Let's put it this way -- the State of California only does paper ballots. No voting machines are allowed in the most populous state. Why? Because they engaged many security consultants and couldn't figure out a way to vote electronically that was safer than paper.

It takes over a month to certify a California election, because every ballot is cross checked with the precinct records, they randomly recount various boxes of ballots, they check that the outcomes are in line with the polling data, and they verify every single signature on every absentee envelope.

I think that, once you start there, you will see that you can compromise those just as easily as a bunch of random iPhones.

I think you're too enamored with technology to see that in this case it isn't being luddites about it that is the problem -- it's that very smart people have tried to solve this for a long time and come up with nothing.

It may be time to admit that the hundreds of security professionals with thousands of years of combined experience may just know more than you about election security.