So you're not in favour of improving election security because we can't magically make it 100% perfect?

Uh, it solves both of those. Let's take a trivial example from a non-expert (i.e. me)

You could publish hash(salt + SSN) = Vote for all votes on a website, and therefore if somebody voted twice they'd hit the same hash twice.

When you vote, you'd get a physical ballot, and a physical receipt, digitally signed by the booth. If what is published online Hash(salt + SSN) doesn't match your receipt, you'd have physical signed proof of tampering.

This list of SSNs is not guarantee to correspond to people who have the right to vote. What I'm trying to claim is the math part of E2E doesn't prevent someone from stuffing the electoral rolls or the SSN database with fake people or preventing eligible voters from being correctly registered.

Well my only contention is that there are practical answers to all the what-ifs you can come up with. If you want to know more you should probably read the academic papers on the topic.

I've read a few of these and, mostly OP is right. A lot of "we fixed voting" systems start with the premise that we know the information of everyone who's legally able to vote. We don't, and getting that information is very hard and at odds with making it easy to register, and subsequently vote.

If you don't have that list, then there's nothing preventing you from padding the votes with fake people. You can try and implement some way of tracing the votes back to people but, first of all see point 1 up there (oh your phone number/email address/home address changed/was misspelled/you're homeless/you're a nomad) and second, you very likely break secret voting.

FWIW there is no perfect voting system--that's the core problem w/ this discussion. We have to choose:

- Do we have a citizen ID (there's a whole ball of wax here, primarily what happens if someone steals or you forget/lose your ID)

- Do we think some people w/ a citizen ID still shouldn't vote (17 year olds, the incarcerated, etc.)

- Do we create a potential link between people and their votes

- Do we allow people to not vote

- Do we require people to register before voting

- Do we allow people to verify their vote was counted

- Do we allow people to verify their vote was counted correctly (unclear how this would work)

- Do we allow people to vote remotely

- Do we create a paper trail

- Do we allow people to fix problems with their ballots

- Do we require people to sign their ballots, and do we require signature verification

Many of these things are at odds with each other, and depending on how you flip the bits, different political interests will win out.

That's the second reason this is such a nerd snipe. It really, really feels like this is a technical problem but it isn't. It's political, cultural, and societal. You're not gonna fix this with an app or an algorithm. If/When we do fix this I'm sure they'll be involved but, the reason will be multipartisan, multicultural consensus that we need to move forward.