This article is right about secret internet voting: it’s fundamentally incompatible with unsupervised devices and global networks. But secrecy is the constraint that breaks everything.
If you instead require public, verifiable voting, most of the "unsolved" problems disappear. The core requirement becomes: everyone can independently verify inclusion and correct tallying.
That’s where blockchains are a genuine game-changer: - They provide a public, append-only, tamper-evident system of record.
- Anyone can recompute the tally from first principles — no trusted servers, no “checker apps,” no special dispute resolution.
- Server compromise or insider attacks stop being catastrophic; fraud becomes immediately visible rather than silently scalable.
- Malware can still affect an individual’s vote, but it can’t secretly change the election at scale — the main failure mode highlighted in this post.
If trust is the goal, opacity is the wrong primitive. The secret ballot is mistaken path solving a non existent and purely theoretical problem of vote buying.
In a world where we expect everything to be easily accessible, the hardships placed by all the steps required to vote (registration, confirming residency location, waiting in line for polling booth) is seriously impacting voter participation. We need to get with the times and modernize this voting infrastructure.