[babyshake]

The thing is, a software based voting system with a sufficient number of checks and balances preventing tampering seems to be a lot more trustworthy to me than human poll watchers and workers. It wouldn't surprise me at this point that there may be moles in parties that are secretly from the other party.

And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that verifies your identity, if you'd like, using the faceId/fingerprint biometrics that most smartphones from recent years have.

[fmbb]

An election needs to be trusted by everyone, and explainable to all voters. It does not help that you believe it is safe. You have to trust the compiler, and the chips, and everything, and convince all voters it works.

Paper ballots are fine. It is not complicated at all and an election is the one thing you just cannot get wrong in a representative democracy. It can cost a bit and you only do it once every few years.

[xorcist]

The obvious problem with smartphone voting is that it's hard to combine with voter secrecy. An abusive spouse or someone bribing the voter could demand to see what vote was cast.

And if anyone can make up a reason to doubt the outcome of the election, it will fail it's objective: Peaceful transfer of power.

The usual way to try to solve this is the ability to override previously cast votes, in secret. But the combination of that and the ability for all interested parties to independently verify the count is not trivial. But not impossible either, much has been written on the subject since e-voting was all the rage in the 90s. One would do good to study this work before designing yet another voting system.