[aj3]

1. You feel that the process is well understood because that’s the only process you’re familiar with and likely it was taught to you since school. In reality other schemes such as electronic voting could be just as clear and transparent, while possibly even more natural as visiting websites and using apps is what people do every day as opposed to gathering physically in order to run an ancient form of poor cryptography manually. Also, no you never had an opportunity to see the whole process end-to-end, as you never were allowed to open and inspect voting ballots or boxes, or attending the central counting place in your state/at the federal level to make sure they are counting everything correctly as well. Think of the bits you saw this way: it your adversaries were evil versions of Penn and Teller, would they be able to fool you by presenting you completely boring looking yet larger than life process that feels completely fair yet of which - due to completely human reasons - you can only see a one facet at a time - all while in fact running a completely different play in the background? Sure, this isn’t how we normally think about adversaries in real life but that’s what the adversaries in cryptography are. When the guy in the video said that there have been some concerns about Estonian voting system which basically means anyone could have stolen the election - that’s what he meant really: Penn and Teller could have arranged in their stage show show such a contraption that would have fooled mock election participants into disclosing their vote or it being discounted, therefore basically anyone can steal our election. 2. This isn’t obvious at all nor substantiated by facts/reasoning. Parties still could hire/attract auditors to oversee the process, independent organizations and foreign counties still could be provided with visibility into the process, in fact the process could be made more verifiable by using preserving audit logs and forensic evidence for generations to come, so that single researcher could viably check their hypotheses across the whole election days, months or years later, not just one small fragment at a time in places they themselves got an opportunity to physically be present, like what you described. And the process could be made much more transparent to the public at large as their vote could be counted in soft real time, meaning they could verify it reached central tally right after voting.

[nemetroid]

> you never were allowed to open and inspect voting ballots or boxes

You are allowed to see that the boxes are empty in the morning, and you are allowed to see each ballot as it is retrieved from the box when it is being counted. Between those two points the box never leaves public eye. Why would you need to open it yourself?

> or attending the central counting place in your state/at the federal level to make sure they are counting everything correctly as well

Why not? All of those are open to the public in my country.

I think you are seriously underestimating the amount of openness that is possible - and practiced - with paper ballots.