> Only if you're an expert cryptographer, else you're deferring to the authority.

At least it’s still provable, a plenty of people can afford to hire their own cryptographers to do verification. Foreign observers can also do the same.

> a plenty of people can afford to hire their own cryptographers to do verification

That's still deferring to the authority. The cryptographer I paid to says it’s all verified, these 1,000,000 people believe them, so naturally I must believe too because why would they lie – is that how it goes? Why not then just drop this whole voting thing, managing keys, checking proofs – why waste time on all this, just let cryptographers announce the results? You trust them, right? They're smart, they'll probably make good decisions.

Paper ballots which can be counted by hand reasonably efficiently enforce a low-tech process that is understood by literally everyone, is resistant to fraud at scale, and leaves massive amount of literal paper trail for audit with no extra provisions. If a citizen wants to be an observer – they just go and see ballots counted. If ZKP were used then what, why only qualified cryptographers are allowed to be qualified observers? Is this really a necessary requirement for a voting process?

Paper voting is provable too. Vote and then observe the counting which is usually public. You can take a look at the box to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with.

Paper voting is vulnerable to basic sleight of hand, and your ability to effectively monitor the count is somewhat limited.

Electronic voting can be much better, but it is of course not a terribly easy problem to solve.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that paper voting is particularly problematic. But I do think that electronic voting could make voting easier and more accessible.

I don't know how vote counting is done in other places, but I've seen it in my country and it's not vulnerable to basic sleight of hand, at least not for more than one or two votes. Poll workers are all citizens randomly selected, the president of each table takes envelopes from a transparent box, opens them, shows them to the other three or four workers of the table (plus any observers that want to be there) and declares the content of the vote.

> But I do think that electronic voting could make voting easier and more accessible.

I don't think so. Think of all the people who have difficulty with basic computer/phone tasks, either because of knowledge or accessibility issues. Do you think all the steps to securely cast votes with an electronic system are going to be easier and more accessible for them?

> I don't think so. Think of all the people who have difficulty with basic computer/phone tasks, either because of knowledge or accessibility issues. Do you think all the steps to securely cast votes with an electronic system are going to be easier and more accessible for them?

I don’t think an in-person electronic voting system needs to be any more difficult than current paper ballots.

Certificate management is more difficult than simply holding an ID card, going to a website/downloading a program is more difficult (and has more potential problems) than going to a polling station, and doing all the steps the program requires will hardly be as simple as "put paper in envelope".