Imagine you have a single majority party that controls all the branches of the government. For them paper voting is a solved problem:
- restrict the rights of observers
- on every polling station where there are no observers, stuff the ballot boxes or just write the "right" tallies
- on polling stations with observers get rid of them using the police or just use at-home voting with mobile ballot boxes to commit fraud
- if any single instance of fraud is uncovered and goes to court, use every nitpick possible to dismiss the case
- finally, a single polling station results overturned do not change the result of the election
The problem is solved all right. Of course, letting them implement e-voting doesn't solve anything. But if the Evil Party is ousted from power by the Good Party via, I don't know, a revolution, there's nothing in the system preventing the Good Party from using the same well-tested vote manipulation processes to start winning every election.
But if the Good Party for some reason is forced to implement an end-to-end auditable e-voting system they will have a much harder time manipulating the results.
- restrict the rights of observers - on every polling station where there are no observers, stuff the ballot boxes or just write the "right" tallies - on polling stations with observers get rid of them using the police or just use at-home voting with mobile ballot boxes to commit fraud - if any single instance of fraud is uncovered and goes to court, use every nitpick possible to dismiss the case - finally, a single polling station results overturned do not change the result of the election
The problem is solved all right. Of course, letting them implement e-voting doesn't solve anything. But if the Evil Party is ousted from power by the Good Party via, I don't know, a revolution, there's nothing in the system preventing the Good Party from using the same well-tested vote manipulation processes to start winning every election.
But if the Good Party for some reason is forced to implement an end-to-end auditable e-voting system they will have a much harder time manipulating the results.