It's not a "little critique", we're basically talking about abandoning the fundamental principles of a functioning democracy here.
If such an election was monitored by international observers, the way we often do with third world countries, the report could be summarised as "probably completely fraudulent, because we weren't allowed to verify anything".
E-voting is election fraud. Period.
Elections should be transparent and verifiable, and every voter should to cast their vote protected from outside interference (i.e., alone and unobserved in a voting booth). These things are not optional.
How so? The electronic voting is modelled exactly based on mail-based voting that is widely used globally. You put your ballot into an envelope, add another one and off it goes. To a public mailbox. Transported, sorted and delivered along with open-back postcards. To be manually handled by volunteers in a way most voters even do not realise exists.
We put your e-ballot into two envelopes making sure cryptographically they require separate keys to open. Deliver it via a secured and openly described channel and provide a cryptographic receipt. We welcome tens and tens of voluntary observers all over the world to observe all the proceedings. And improve the processes and code with every iteration there is.
How is the electronic approach less secure than the physical one?
Also, what many do not realise, is the fallback. Should there be an inkling of doubt about whether your vote went where it was supposed to or was handled properly, you can go and vote physically on the voting day and have that vote prevail over the electronic one.
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.
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.
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.
If such an election was monitored by international observers, the way we often do with third world countries, the report could be summarised as "probably completely fraudulent, because we weren't allowed to verify anything".
E-voting is election fraud. Period.
Elections should be transparent and verifiable, and every voter should to cast their vote protected from outside interference (i.e., alone and unobserved in a voting booth). These things are not optional.