>I.e., you can have a paperless blockchain solution IFF you abandon vote secrecy. That is a very tough to swallow pill.

This is false. I know this is a common thought on HN because some formerly popular youtuber did a video about this topic that is still regularly reposted here, but he was already wrong in theory back then and it is certainly wrong in practice today. Secrecy/anonymity and verifiability are no longer mutually exclusive as anyone who is well versed in modern cryptography will be able to tell you.

the issue isn't that people won't believe it or that blockchain can't preserve secrecy of ballots (it can). it is, in part, that crypto eventually has to meet the real world, but mainly that crypto is hard and governments might not be up to the task. for example, last year the IACR (which had been doing online voting via crypto for more than a decade, and still is) had to void their elections because one of the trustees lost their private key and the results were impossible to decrypt. while it was ultimately fine because the IACR isn't really a high-stakes operation, how would you feel if your government just said "sorry folks, there's been some technical issues and elections will have to be redone"? would you believe them or suspect they're up to no good? what if this happens in a very contended and heated election?

> The public needs to believe it, and hypertechnical solutions are a hard sell.

Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

We have the solution it's just not practicable. Cryptocurrencies and hardware wallets have solved this problem. But they operate at the scale of people in their bedrooms not hundreds of millions of people voting over one day all over a country.

Passports would need to become like hardware wallets with screens such as Trezor. Who's firmware and design are open source.

The screen means I can see what I'm signing and later be shown what I signed.

Now, I don't want people to know who I vote for. So we make it e-passport gate so that no one can enter with me.

Now I want to be able to verify my vote at a later date but not let others know it was me. Well this too is solved by multiple cryptocurrencies like monero and z-cash.

I can go to my local town hall enter a room alone using a e-passport style gate and check my vote at the machine. My device can verify my vote.

Someone with the vote can only see that 1 of N voters did it. Where N is so large they can't identify me.

No duplicate vote is possible.

Literally no one would agree to this however.

You can always include a nonce to decode the votes true value or provide an alternative for people that are vulnerable to coerction. If you need an example: monero crypto currency is the pinnacle of it.

You could have verification be done in person and not online with no way to share it.

retraction of vote with a new vote solves this.

Since I'm able to retract my vote, I cannot sell it. And since I can retract my vote, I cannot be coerced in any way.

this is out of context, nobody would see who they have voted for in practice

There are problems that electronic voting does solve: in some countries, moving paper ballots are problematic and subject to tampering. This shows up in mail-in voting, where there's always a risk of loss and delay. Overseas voters are an issue, e.g. deployed military.

There is a specific problem with mail-in voting and disabled voters, for example elderly people who can't go to the polls and can't get an electronic ballot marker. 25 US states deliver ballots electronically and 15 allow electronic voting for this specific case [1].

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/electronic-ball...

This problem is unavoiable as you ultimately have to trust the root, just like with paper ballots, so this is not an applicable problem. Although you could include encrypted metadata for location, id number attached to a real person and other information that would make verification after the fact much, much easier.

Indeed. The rubber hose always beats cryptography. Always.

So if someone else knows my private key and voted for me not the same way i intended to vote, this will be visible in final results. And then you can start asking questions. If they have my private key and voted the way i intended, then its no problem :)

How much later? Cryptographic systems certainly have methods for allowing revoting up to a deadline, but endlessly mutable voting is insane. It's also not really any different from today. I can say I didn't vote for candidate A 12 months after the upcoming election and it means... well... nothing.

You can do A' in some US states... you can vote by mail/early vote, and then later request they spoil that ballot and do it again, or by voting on election day the mail-in is invalidated.