The problem with "secure voting" is that we don't have a "requirements spec". We think we do, but everyone is using different set of unspoken assumptions.
Let's consider the anonymity of votes. Some voters care a lot that nobody can know how they voted. Other voters proudly declare on social media how they voted.
Do we really need a one-size-fits-all solution?
Do we really need a one-size-fits-all solution?
A lot of voter security issues become easier if we can relax some other requirements. If users are willing to post their votes to Twitter/Facebook instead of going down to a polling place, then we can use social media as our voting system.
Given Dino's point: the choice we are discussing in this hypothetical isn't "anonymity vs. public". The choice in this hypothetical is "anonymity vs. disenfranchisement". Some people who cannot otherwise vote my choose the other option.
We already have multiple choices for voting, with mail-in votes for some voters. Some states make this rare (you must have a good reason), other states make it the default. In Oregon, most people vote via a mail-in ballot but may choose instead going to the poling place.
So offer the voters a voting app. It doesn't need to be secure, it just needs to be a choice. The choices aren't "identical requirements as other means", but alternate requirements like "this makes your choice public".
...then work backwards. Maybe to make an acceptable voting app isn't actually making the vote "public", but instead some other compromise.
So much of our "election security" stuff is focused on people going to a polling place and entering their choice in a machine (or with a machine's help). This seems anachronistic to me. Maybe we don't need to keep doing it this way.
They past a law recently in Georgia. It has paper ballots, but only with a barcode that the voter couldn't verify. Many (rightly) criticized this. But I don't think that's the biggest issue. Instead, the issue is what happens if tampering is detected.
What happens when you discover somebody has tampered with the election? There's no provision for redoing the election, no standard set ahead of time how to fix the tampered ballots or throw them out.
As far as I can tell, what happens when there is a mass tampering attempt is that the power in power then decides which rules to use in order to resolve the problem, meaning they'll choose the rules that benefit them.
That's what happened in the Bush 2000 election: the state legislature decided on the rules to count questionable ballots after the ballots had been cast.
