> You speak as if I'm advocating for e-voting systems over paper voting systems. I'm not. In general, most paper voting systems that are used in practice are more secure than most e-voting systems that are used in practice.

Keep in mind that my point was specifically about high stakes elections and you reacted to it without making that limitation. Don't you think my conclusion about your comment follows kind of naturally from that context? I also would argue there is a niche for E-voting to exist, but it is the responsibility of us technically literate to make it very clear for which purposes it is not suitable and why.

> There are big issues, like a foreign superpower attempting to hack the results, and then there are small issues, like this one: people accidentally spoiling ballots.

The slowness and amount of people needed for the paper ballot is a feature not a bug as it makes wide scale attacks extremely complex, labour intensive and risky AND regular people (those that need to believe in the results!) can understand what is going on if they want to. This comes at the cost that the correctness of the result can be not always guarantueed. A huge number of spoiled ballots isn't necessarily a sign that people don't understand how to make a cross, it is a sign of protest and used as such.

> Fully paper system. You walk into a voting booth. You scribble down the number "7" on paper. You walk out of the booth and put the paper in the ballot box. Later some election official is counting the votes and they look at your scribble and they wonder, hmm, is this a "7" or is this a "1". Your vote is disqualified.

I have never seen an election where a vote isn't ticking or checking a ballot box, maybe this is different in Finland? Also: The elections I voted in, in 2 different countries always came with precise pictured instruction how a valid vote looks like and what would be invalid. I am not sure if I should be worried about the vote of people who fail to put an X into a box when given pictured instructions. This is a weakness with one specific implementation of a paper ballot, not a inherent weakness of the system. If we are to look for a good comparison we should compare the best way to do paper based elections to the best way to do it digitally and draw our comparisons from that.

> See how B) is exactly the same system as A) except it offers voters the ability to see how their vote is going to be interpreted, before they cast the vote into the ballot box?

This isn't without it's own risk either. Having worked with computer vision systems and programmed them I can tell you there is no 100% guarantuee that the result that air-gapped machine showed the voter in the voting both is the same as what is reached later – not even if we assume the exact same machine to be used for the count. Also: That isn't necessarily what I'd call a E-Voting system.

> That said, it sounds to me like you are imagining all electronic voting schemes to be "black box" schemes relying on blindly trusting both authorities and computers

No you get me wrong. What I said is that for the majority of the electorate it would be that way. I can readily imagine building an electronic voting system that I can trust – and maybe even one where independent experts would trust it. But that is the easy part. The hard part is building a system into which the bloke from the pub that struggled with undergraduate math and stopped thinking about it since he left school two decades ago can trust. And not just by trusting an authority, but by checking for himself.

As much as I like the idea and challenge of such projects, I can't help put think that the inclusion of those who are less capable to understand is worth more than the potential gains in efficiency or interface-correctness of E-voting systems – especially if the fate of nations hinge on the fact that people trust it.