After spending some years in development of cryptographic software, I became an ardent fan of not-so-easily forged pieces of paper. (Try counterfeiting modern banknotes. NOT easy.)

Cryptographic software is tricky, very easy to implement incorrectly or with major security gaps, completely opaque to the amateur user, vulnerable to all kinds of zero-days and possibly even progress in mathematics (God save us from the day when someone comes with a fast factorization algorithm). If secure enough, it will be burdensome enough that people will try to circumvent it. It runs on a stack of OSes and hardware that may (read: of course they do) have fatal security flaws rendering your secure app insecure.

No, thanks. Give me a paper ballot any day.

You’re saying that it is possible for a cryptographic system to be insecure. I’m saying that it’s impossible for human counting to be secure.

Protocol: Alice and Bob send their votes to Eve. Eve wins. The end.

Votes are anything but easily forged, they are in fact quite trivial to secure.

What IS easily forged and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to secure is a result printed out by some opaque computer that is running a huge amount of software on an extremely complex processor which runs its own closed-source firmware, probably communicating over the internet 'securely' to some other computers.

Oh yeah because we don’t use software at all in the current system.

Cryptography won't help if you want a secret ballot.

Not true, there's a lot of research into voting systems that provide both secrecy and various verifiabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

A voting system where voters can prove which way they voted is vulnerable to coercion or retribution.

The manager rounds up the workers and "suggests" they all compare how they voted. Those who voted "pro-company" will likely reveal their vote. So for everyone who refuses to reveal their vote, the manager checks a box next to their name on the attendance sheet.

There may be a voting system that provides all the desired guarantees, but I doubt such a system is also easily understood and trusted by the average voter.

You can partially defeat this by allowing people to change votes. Then everyone has something that "proves" they at some point voted pro-company but they could have changed it later.

Ok what about when you're coerced to change your vote?

You change your vote, collect your reward, and change your vote back again?

Just make that kind of thing illegal like so many other things around union elections and come down on them like a ton of bricks if they violate this. Both the employers and unions.

We have secret ballots because this is not a solvable problem. If you're threatened with your job it is one thing, if you are threatened with violence for voting "incorrectly" it is another.

Current protocol: Alice sends her personal information and vote in the mail to Eve. TV tells Alice that the system is secure.

Couldn't you use something like monero but, I guess then you couldn't audit it.

There are people who are experts in cryptography, and there are people who are experts in rigging elections. The author of this comic is neither.