If you can verify your own vote, you can be forced to divulge that information. There's no technical solution to this problem.

There is a simple solution: generate a random public key as part of the voting process and print it out for later verification but also include plenty of other people's public keys in the printout.

The voter can remember the position of their own key if they choose to for later validation against the open ledger and can use the others for deniability (if needed).

That is not true. See work by Andrew Neff on verifiable shuffles of secrets. It is practical to produce a proof that can be verified by the voter but not useful in proving which way the ballot has been cast to anyone else.

I skimmed through the paper here (http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf) and it doesn't appear to solve the problem. Any time you can see your vote, so can anyone looking over your shoulder.

The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.

Yeah it makes the use of electronic voting less vulnerable to tampering, but obviously the voting still needs to he done in a private booth.

I don't feel like I could create trust in democracy with something as complicated as a private key for a mostly non-technical nation such as Canada or France.

I can simply demand your private key in exchange for a reward or avoidance of punishment. "Hand me your phone and I will cast this vote"