[staunch]

You can only observe a single ballot counting location, while there are hundreds or thousands to observe. Someone could be bribing people in dozens or hundreds of locations and there are lots of tricks to pull.

You're not really verifying much at all by watching the counting process. It's really just a false sense of security. You actually have no idea if all the ballots are being counted, if they're all real ballots, or if some have been tampered with, etc.

There are millions of programmers in the world, any number of them could decide to audit the code, and if they discover flaw, everyone could be told in an instant. There could be huge security bounties to incentive audits. We trust math and software to maintain all of civilization but for some reason it's impossible to make it work for voting? That seems incredibly unlikely.

[throwaway936482]

Again, I can be one of the people doing the counting. Not being funny but if you have an already corrupt electoral system then your government is not going to adopt your magical, totally secure, block chain based, bug free system. They're going to adopt a compromised, proprietary, back doored e voting solution say "look, magical block chain verification as recommended by geeks" and then attack / arrest / kill anyone who questions it's veracity. You're trying to solve a social problem, a corrupt government, with a technological solution that the government itself will undermine or reject. On the other hand you can run free and fair elections by leveraging the powers of observers and volunteers in a war zone or with a corrupt government using paper, pens, boxes and locks.

[mhh__]

The whole point is that the people doing the counting are working together but from opposing parties/candidates.

Everyone is watching you, if you try to influence the process the police will (and have done) come down like a sack of bricks.

We also (used to) trust OpenSSL... We thought speculative execution was safe too. Paper is easy, paper is cheap. KISS