Best option is paper ballots that are machine-readable and human-readable.
Cryptography doesn't help; what you need are processes which make fraud difficult (for instance, observers with line of site to all ballot boxes from when voting starts until they're counted; cross-checking counts of blank, spoiled, and voted ballot papers before & after voting, translucent ballot boxes that are clearly empty at the start of election day, etc.,)
I'm not sure it even matters how difficult fraud is. Conspiracy theorists will see what they want to see, especially when primed by their candidate to assume fraud in the case of a loss.
Accurate Voting seems like the most viable use case for triple entry accounting, you know that thing that got created in 2009 by that mysterious Satoshi guy and everyone hates it now and thinks it’s a Ponzi scheme- totally legitimate use case here with voting and the only real world scenario I know of where the solution hasn’t located the problem yet.
Exit polls are also an important tool. They show routine, systematic fraud in US elections, starting with the introduction of electronic voting, mostly in areas without paper trails. I'll try to keep this non-partisan, but there are plenty of independent peer-reviewed papers showing clear evidence of count tampering, and they all implicate the same party.
Hint: It's not the party that keeps proposing paper ballot mandates at the federal level.
This is definitely going to be used as proof that Trump won in a landslide in 2020 and all of the poll watchers nationwide are in the (((Democrats))) pockets.
> some straightforward cryptographic scheme
Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.
The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced.
There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with voters who aren’t cryptographers, and whose personal devices get hacked and stolen, has proved to be a difficult problem.
Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter.
There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems.
From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.”
Please state requirements before elements of a solution.
The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying. This system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy.
> Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.
Ron Rivest and David Chaum are rather well known designers of cryptographic systems, and I don't think they would LOL at crytographic voting schemes considering that they have designed one [1].
