The actual votes on a block can be encrypted separately.
The chain makes the system completely and easily auditable. You can't easily game the system. Votes can be easily tallied and randomly sampled to ask voters if the votes match up.
As to repercussions, you already sign your ballots and register to vote. Because of this, there's pretty much no stopping government repercussions if they chose to take action.
Most importantly, it gets rid of all the election fraud debate.
But then someone has to decrypt the vote, and the vote has metadata about its source. You have to operate under the assumption that a gov actor would take that information and punish you if it was not the vote they wanted (however unlikely, that’s what we’re protecting against)
The chain makes the system completely and easily auditable. You can't easily game the system. Votes can be easily tallied and randomly sampled to ask voters if the votes match up.
As to repercussions, you already sign your ballots and register to vote. Because of this, there's pretty much no stopping government repercussions if they chose to take action.
Most importantly, it gets rid of all the election fraud debate.