There's still the problem that you can still coerce and verify then use surveillance and the fear of surveillance to keep people from changing their vote. Random rechecks the day the polls close would keep a lot of people from risking changing their vote after the initial check-in.
Even beyond any theoretical security measures one huge benefit of in person voting is it limits the available attack. With IPV to steal an election you have to find a way to either physically bring enough people to enough polling places to swing the election or corrupt the poll watcher system and steal it in the counting phase. With electronic voting anyone in the world has a chance to attack you. Anything that requires Joe/Jane Citizen to reliably or securely operate their computer is kind of doomed for a long time IMO.
I do think that voting should be as streamlined and easy as possible. If electronic voting becomes a thing, you should still be able to do an in-person voting at a poll both on election day, an in-person absentee voting at a designated place, a mail-in absentee voting, etc. in addition to the e-voting.
All of these (except for in-person voting on election day) should have a sealed timestamp and a public key/barcode attached so previous ballots can be nullified with a more recent vote by an other—or the same—means.
idk. It is already done quite successfully in many democracies, including Iceland and Estonia.
I’m guessing the vote is sealed with a key or a barcode, if a later vote arrives, a system will order a previous vote with a matching key/barcode to be destroyed. Finally on voting day, the link between any personally identifiable information is destroyed.
EDIT: Just to clarify, there should never be a time when a ballot is unsealed and a link between a barcode and a person exists in the system. A counter scans an absentee ballot before unsealing it, if the person voted in-person the scanner should reject the vote and order it to be destroyed the link could have been destroyed at any point between then and when the person showed up to the polling station. If they didn’t show up, the scanner will order the link to be destroyed, the counter will then pass this ballot on to be counted. Importantly the counter (nor any human for that matter) never has access to a link to a personally identifiable information, all the counter sees is the barcode.
EDIT 2: I don’t know if this is how counting is done in democracies that allow you to nullify a previous vote by voting again, but it is a system that could work, conjured up by a mere spectator.
That probably works better for smaller countries. Here in the US mail in voting kind of works that way in that the ballots are sealed until they're 'accepted' and then the ballots are removed and the identifying shell envelope is discarded. The big slow down is actually going through all the submitted votes and validating then counting, most in person votes here in the US are counted via machine immediately at the polling place.
Somewhere between 25-50% of votes depending on state are cast through some early mechanism and under this none of those could be counted until election day which is a large increase in the number of votes that need to be counted and makes them more difficult to count.
One other benefit of being able to count everything in person on the day it's cast is the votes don't have to move outside the polling place for initial counting which makes monitoring easier.
It's a nice and convenient idea but I don't see the small benefit of being able to change votes (how many people honestly want to change their vote?) vs the large increase in complexity.
Like previously stated being able to change the vote is crucial to limit the effectiveness of voter intimidation. You simply vote however your intimidator orders you, and then you change your vote afterwards.
It also has the benefits of allowing voters who in absentee vote early for a candidate that later drops out (i.e. Washington State voters who voted for Elizabeth Warren) to correct their vote based on this new information.
Regarding monitoring. Mail in ballots are sent to the polling place on election night for counting. They are counted just like any other ballots and can be monitored as easily as in-person ballots. I suppose e-votes could as easily be printed out and counted in the same place.
The voter intimidation problem only really comes out of adopting a new system where you can check your vote to begin with though.. Our current system only really suffers from that even being a possibility with mail in votes.
> It also has the benefits of allowing voters who in absentee vote early for a candidate that later drops out (i.e. Washington State voters who voted for Elizabeth Warren) to correct their vote based on this new information.
Maybe for a primary it's a useful feature but there are simpler options like ranked choice that could be used to do that. Though there are still uses for votes to people who are out of the race because it gives them voting power at the convention if there's not a decisive winner.
Also if we're letting things change that much primaries are never really over in a state. One of the reason for sequential primaries is that it lets smaller campaigns have a chance because they don't have to compete everywhere at once.
Even beyond any theoretical security measures one huge benefit of in person voting is it limits the available attack. With IPV to steal an election you have to find a way to either physically bring enough people to enough polling places to swing the election or corrupt the poll watcher system and steal it in the counting phase. With electronic voting anyone in the world has a chance to attack you. Anything that requires Joe/Jane Citizen to reliably or securely operate their computer is kind of doomed for a long time IMO.