Why simply deride electronic voting as a solution in search a problem? There are many problems it solves.

1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote.

2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-bec...)

3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won?

Aren’t these important enough problems for a democracy to solve?

Instead of simply downvoting, why not actually address what I am saying! I am going to go point by point.

Sure, absentee ballots are a thing, but guess what. People like apps. If it’s secure enough for everyone’s banking needs, why not for a vote?

You can make the same argument about money — that banking apps are a honeypot for thieves etc. And yet we have made banking apps so so secure that you’d use them to move thousands of dollars.

If everyone voted from their phone, it could be anonymous and cryptographically secure. And a Merkle tree would record all results.

What is the issue? Every problem you point out with electronics can be done with paper ballots, too.

The interface can lie to you? Has been done with butterfly ballots and others.

The vote counting process is rigged? Have different groups audit the process.

In fact, having cryptographically secure receipts makes it extra easy and fast to verify votes. Al Gore would have won, because they wouldn’t have has to take so much time for a recount:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ

Instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh, X is an issue!” why not simply work on fixing the issue?

So let’s run down the issues:

1. Not enough access to phones and computers

Fine, people without phones can still vote the old fashioned way.

2. Stealing a phone

A very inefficient way to fake a vote

3. Interfaces that lie to you

Ignoring the fact that machines already do this (https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M) the interfaces would need to be audited by different groups using each other’s interfaces in an anonymous manner (not like when Uber’s greyball https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... ). This is the general problem of the Trusted Computing Base.

4. Anonymity

Listen, should we know how every person voted?? We do now! Thanks Government. Best Voting System Ever (https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-...)

Erm sorry. The solution. Token mixing. You get one token per person, but then they go through a cryptographically securd mixer before being used to sign your vote. Kind of like with Monero rings.

5. Accountability

How can we prove the votes happened the way you wanted them to?

Well, YOU still have your token on YOUR phone (no one else does) so your app can audit the Merkle tree.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs would be overkill here because proving how you voted to someone else is important (See #3, above). In addition, ZK proofs are a bit ivory-tower idealistic since most people don’t have the knowhow to “produce a fake alternative vote”.

The Merkle Tree can consist of smaller branches, one for each district. The results can be tallied in near real time, and verified by anyone. Results would be known in real-time.

6. But realtime reporting will affect voters!

Yes, and it currently already does, with Ohio, Michigan, and so on. The current system makes some states way more important than others:

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016

Why not require all states to have primaries at the same time and not reveal the results til the end? This is a political, not technological, solution.

The only one major problem I see with electronic voting is #3, the trusted computing base. I listed the main solution above, but I am sure there will be many improvements on it.