[DJBunnies]

I believe the piece we're missing is the government (citizen?) service which issues (manages, replaces, revokes) constituents' cryptographic tokens for use with such things.

Then our voting systems could be electronic, secure, open, verifiable, and mostly private; assuming effective oversight / this organization does not issue fraudulent tokens or leak keys or identities (big assumption, but I don't think it's impossible.)

[kaashif]

Isn't a vote being verifiably tied to a person actually a bad thing? Then you can actually check what e.g. your wife or kids voted for and punish them if they vote wrong. Or get people to pay for votes, but doing that at scale is obviously hard.

Maybe this isn't what you meant by verifiable, but there are systems with this property and they are bad.

[dandelany]

The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf

[DJBunnies]

Verifiable in this context means I can verify my vote was tallied correctly.

[tamimio]

Exactly, we can definitely build a secure online voting system, far more secure than the current paper one, but it will come with some downsides. One of them is a national digital ID mandated to all voters, which obviously can and will be abused by the government.

Another reason (besides what I mentioned in another post below) why such a secure system will never see the light, even if we can technically build it, is that the average person will start to question: why do we still need to vote for representatives if we have such a system in place? Can't we as citizens vote directly on bills/acts? Which makes sense since the current system was designed before all these tech and connectivity.

[FeistySkink]

Yeah, we have certificates on our ID cards, but they need to be manually renewed every 3 years which necessitates a trip to the designated authority. And then the underlying system gets changed every so often invalidating the card types altogether, so they can be used as dummy IDs only.