A lot of issues being brought up with electronic voting seem to me to be solvable via a blockchain technology like Ethereum.
> Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine.
If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go.
> Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool
This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key.
I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?
Because it's utterly utterly unnecessary and can be solved by the very simple tick box, count ballot in public, let anyone watch or volunteer to do so system. The existing problems with the American system of dodgy ballots, hanging chads, OCR errors etc. are causes by too much technology. Get rid of it all and use a wholly manual system. Treat postal votes the same way and count them at the same time as other ballots.
> Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine.
If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go.
> Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key.
I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?