In practice, I think there needs to be a physical trail no matter what. It needs to be both verifiable, anonymous, and auditable by parties all at the same time

In practice, I think there needs to be a physical trail no matter what. It needs to be both verifiable, anonymous, and auditable by parties all at the same time, and that can and should be done with paper. I say this as someone who otherwise detests paperwork, I only check my mail once every month or two. Being more secure than banks is not enough, because banks are not 100% anonymous, and you can fix banking errors days, months, or even years later. With voting, you don't want to have a trail of who voted for whom. In my state, Massachusetts, we use physical machines that scan the votes as they go in, and count them and return a tally at the end of the day. Personally, I wish we just counted them manually, but at least they're not connected to the internet I guess, and there's always physical ballots that can be counted in the issue of a challenge or conflict. The main advantage to using machines, in our current system, is that they're faster. But who cares? You get your results at the end of the evening vs at the end of the week? There's no real urgency there, officials don't take office until some time after that. But just to play devil's advocate against myself: I do think that liquid democracy, where people could dynamically vote for politicians/delegates (either carte blanche or certain delegates for certain categories and others for others), individual bills, and such on the fly, would be an interesting use of voting online if you were to make a new political system entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy I just think there's no way to implement this properly.