The idea that machines are required to conduct elections is incorrect, and is not accepted in all civilized nations.
Paper ballots and invigilation are all that is required to run a fair and fully auditable election, and the introduction of computers to the methods and execution of elections is nothing more than tech / futurist cultism.
Fully invigilated and hand counted paper ballot run elections are what is required. The only reasonable addition to this is, perhaps, a system like Ron Rivest's "ThreeBallot" System that does not require computer tabulation, remains paper based and also introduces a level of verifiability.
1/ Its implementation is familiarly looking and simple for voters to understand, compared to other encryption systems (arguably, the most important advantage of all).
2/ The ballots can be counted directly, without decryption. This is because they have the property that the sum of the marks is the sum of the votes for the candidate, even though any individual ballot section cannot reveal the candidate preference of the voter.
3/ There is no key that requires protection or secrecy in order to maintain security (the "Achilles' heel" of many proposed systems).
4/ While it requires a machine to validate the ballots before depositing them, afterwards the ballot record is entirely on paper and requires no additional security process beyond that afforded traditional ballots.
5/ Each voter's vote is secret, preventing vote-selling and coercion.
6/ Each voter can verify that his vote was not discarded and was correctly used and not altered in the computation of the election result. (And if not, the voter is in a position to prove that the vote counters cheated.)
7/ Everybody can verify that the election result was computed correctly.
8/ The method is designed for use with paper ballots and requires primarily low-tech devices, but is compatible with more advanced technologies.
The motivating animus of trying to arbitrarily mechanize processes comes from the psychological need of some people to hand everything in their lives over to machines, since they are incapable of handling real life themselves.
Machine are tools, not ends in themselves, and subjecting everything to them is not rational nor is it a proper application of technology.
Bitcoin was required because the money cannot be invigilated. Voting however, is not like that. It can be successfully audited by hand, and is done this way world-wide.
Invigilated voting systems do not require trust; in fact this is the only aspect in which it is similar to Bitcoin: "Don't Trust, Verify". Machines are not trusted and cannot be trusted to count votes, and neither are the human vote counters in an invigilated system; every vote is seen and verified by multiple people who are adversaries. It works. No one is trusted.
To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To a Bitcoiner, every problem looks like...what exactly?
The purpose of conducting a verifiably fair election is not the implementation and application of technology; the election itself is the purpose.
