Why can't voting just be done on the blockchain with a public ledger? Any vote could be verified. I'd feel more secure with this than paper ballots, which are very insecure and have been tampered with so many times.
Blockchains are voodoo, and I'd really think the ongoing disaster of Ethereum should have cooled some of these absurd claims of perfect security.
With a blockchain on the other hand, anybody could verify that their vote went through (just like anybody can verify any Bitcoin/Ethereum transaction). I'd feel much more confident in this than some black box pen and paper because there's zero way to verify anything under a pen-and-paper system.
What disaster of Ethereum? Ethereum is doing pretty well.
Personally, I know for certain that my vote in the last election went through because I have seen the complete process myself and have verified that the published vote counts match the once counted in the polling station. There is no black box left.
So you worked at a polling station that had it's shit together? Great, but that doesn't inspire me much confidence. Though really the main reason I want electronic voting is for convenience (it really is a hassle, and election days aren't national holidays), increased participation, and so that we could move more towards direct democracy and liquid democracy.
I don't know why people have so much faith in black box paper-based voting systems. There's absolutely no way for any of us to verify that our own votes really went through. If there was vote rigging in Florida or New Mexico in 2000, then none of us would know.
In South Korea's 2012 presidential election (won by Park Geun-hye who's now in jail), there's reasonable reason to suspect that the voting may have been manipulated [1]. There was even a documentary made on it called "The Plan". Even if one dismisses this as mere conspiracy, the reality is that there's absolutely no way for us to verify it.
The move to electronic voting is inevitable, and I long for the day that this is commonplace because then it would enable us to do cool things like direct democracy and liquid democracy.
Another issue is employers pressing workers to vote for certain politician etc. They could flat-out ask for one's blockchain ID. With paper voting, there's no way to valid way to get proof.
Paper voting trust is based on crowd trust. Anyone can check voting make sure everything is going smoothly. Don't trust your local voting committee? Go and sign up to volunteer!
Direct democracy has more issues than technical challenges. #1 being education. And that very few people would bother to put enough time to go over proposals and cast in informed vote. Even in today's loose voting cycles, a lot of people vote based on feels and shitty advertising.
We can't expect a major chunk of population to participate in day-to-day politics and vote frequently. We'd be stuck with low participation and only "interested" votes which would very likely not be representative of whole population. And paper&pen works pretty well for voting once a year or so.