[makeitsuckless]

Mail based voting is also extremely dubious. We allow it in some exceptional cases for a small minority. Personally I'm against the concept.

Also, I never mentioned "secure". That's a red herring when it comes to any form of electronic voting. It's about democracy, which includes the guarantee that each vote is cast in absolute freedom.

Nobody can hold a gun to a voters head, and no voter can be forced to justify their vote afterwards, because they and only they know what they voted.

We didn't build that guarantee into our democracies by accident, and taking it because we've invented some shiny new toys that bring us nothing but some minor convenience is an insult to democracy.

And like I said, it's ridiculous that we hold third world countries and new democracies to those standards, but have started to massively ignore them ourselves, because we are too lazy to maintain the very foundations of our democracy.

[belZaah]

That guarantee of no gun is there in Estonian case. If somebody has a gun to your head you can go to a physical polling station and vote there overriding your forced vote.

[makeitsuckless]

That's the complete reverse of a guarantee. The person with the gun can stop met from going to a polling station.

Hence, in a true democracy, the only free way to vote is at a polling station, in a voting both constructed in such a way that I have total privacy from the moment I vote to the moment I put the vote in the ballot box, yet transparant enough so it can be observed by anyone (hence, short curtains, box in the same open space, etc).

We even put polling stations in hospitals, care homes, embassies abroad, military bases etcetera to ensure voting happens in total freedom, transparency and anonymity. This principle also applies to the counting of the votes.

All of this did not come about by accident, and the fact that it's being abandoned by people who do not wish to even argue why they want to remove fundamental democratic safeguards should be met with extreme suspicion.

The arguments in favor of electronic voting are extremely weak, and in many instances e-voting has already been found to be subject to deliberate manipulation.

There is no excuse for lowering our standards for the most essential element of a democracy.