No, I said that reducing the attack surface to a subset of the problems you normally have is good and makes elections cheaper. That’s what cryptographic protocols, including blockchain, do in general. They replace the need to trust corruptible middlemen, with a protocol that is infeasible or extremely hard to subvert, and which leaves traces of the subversion. Crypto is used all the time such as when you use cryptographic hashes to detect tampering, or merkle proofs to prove something was included correctly in a larger part.

You then replied essentially: “well since you still have some problems, you can’t trust the election… the paper way is the only right way”.

Some people might be wilfully misunderstanding because it’s “cool to rag on blockchain” or whatever. People who always repeat a refrain like “this is simply the only right way to do things” are trying to convince not by arguments but by pushing a dogma. And most skeptics of technologies have been wrong, including skeptics of airplanes, computers, etc.

Estonia for example is already doing secure elections online for years, explain that https://e-estonia.com/how-did-estonia-carry-out-the-worlds-f...

The hand recount took too long and the Supreme Court stepped in and “just picked a winner”. Which later counts showed to have been the wrong result. Citing the machine counting alongside it doesnt really help your case because the machine counting was all kinds of ad-hoc and hybrid things (including the dreaded silly “butterfly ballots”) which is exactly what people advocate for, when they try to argue for avoiding a fully consistent and uniform electronic system. They want all the little variations and manual counting “so no one can hack the whole thing”. So yes it’s a perfectly valid argument to point out that delays caused by this led to the wrong outcome (and had consequences like ignoring Bin Laden, allowing 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, clamping down on civil liberties in USA, raiding Social Security etc.)

All the problems you cited above are present in the current system — including having to prove how you voted to challenge the results. Except in the current system there are far more problems, including not even being able to physically show up at the polling place (because it is too far), or proving that the poll workers corrupted your vote, added extra ballots, literally anything. Out of sight out of mind I guess.

And across the world, elections are done even worse. Consider the recent election of Lukashenko in Belarus. People in districts where he got 80% were trying to ask around who voted for him and complained that very few had said they did. It’s all arguments based on hearsay. That is the flip side of not being able to prove how you voted. In fact if they wanted to know how you voted, in your manual system, they could just take a camera outside the booth and look at timing to know when you voted. Or just put a camera in the booth. But in fact it’s far worse than that, the voter databases include driver’s licenses and addresses and social security numbers, in most US states, AND party affiliation is 94% correlated to how you vote so all this paper ballot “security theater” to prevent “being ABLE to prove how you voted” gets you nowhere: https://ballotpedia.org/Availability_of_state_voter_files

And oh yeah… in the system I described you can anonymously challenge the results because you have cryptographic signatures but your own private key came out of a mixer, so you don’t need to identify yourself to prove your vote didnt match what’s in the system. Enough complaints and we ALL know which districts were corrupt, and very quickly.