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.
Pen-and-paper is not observable by anybody. It's a complete black box, and there's no way for me to verify that my vote went through.
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.
With a blockchain, you could verify that your vote went through but so can your neighbour. Even if you find some way around that: If you can see how you see how your vote was counted, you are able to prove to someone else how you voted making vote selling possible. These are two big reasons not to use such a system.
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.
You would need a hash to verify the transaction, and hashes wouldn't be publicly tied to one's identity. Thus if I claim that a hash represents me, then there'd be no way for anybody else to verify that. It's a legitimate concern, but not a hurdle that can't be overcome.
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.
Election days are always Sundays and even if you work on that day, your employer must let you vote. Voting by letter also exists if you absolutely can't make it.
You'd need an elaborate operation involving hundreds of people to tamper with paper ballots in a meaningful way. There's no way such operation would go unnoticed. How many people are needed to hijack e-voting system?
You would also need an elaborate operation involving tons of people to hijack a blockchain-based e-voting system. The beauty of blockchain is that anybody could verify their own vote on the public ledger (eg. like etherscan.io for Ethereum).
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.
Actually it is good that nobody can get proof for their own vote. Thus votes selling is harder - provider cannot provide anything to seller. And yes, taking pictures of your own ballot is not allowed over there. Camera shutter sound may cause quite an issue.
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!
Either way, we need to move to electronic voting eventually, and inevitably will. The reason being that our political system is broken, and the people don't feel represented. In this day and age, we have the technology to accommodate a real direct democracy instead of our broken representative system, but this isn't feasible without e-voting.
Why do we "need" to? I'm yet to hear a single reason. Pen&paper just works. And it's as good as electronic voting regarding representation.
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.
Blockchains are voodoo, and I'd really think the ongoing disaster of Ethereum should have cooled some of these absurd claims of perfect security.