It's not difficult at all to verify - just insist that the person being coerced take a selfie with the ballot. I'm told this has already been implemented by communist terrorists in India, though I can't find any English language sources.
I think a big chunk of the opposition to electronic voting by techies is simply a failure to recognize that physical systems can also be hacked. Which is of course silly - the only time I voted, I did so fraudulently.
(The lack of voter ID laws in NJ made it very easy. To prove a point to a friend that voter ID laws allowed fraud, I voted as my friend. Then he voted as me. I won the bet.)
We've got a simple way to defeat this particular attack in Norway - the ballots are in the booth. You can take a dozen if you like.
Electoral workers inspect the booth regularly to make sure all parties' ballots are available.
If you cannot find a particular party's ballot, you are encouraged to take the remainder of another couple of ballots (So that you won't have to walk over to staff, asking them to provide more ballots for party X), leave the booth, bin the ballots and ask staff to refill the booth with all valid ballots.
Once you leave the booth (which is right in front of the electoral clerks), you head over to the desk with the voter register, your identity is confirmed against the register and then your (folded) ballot is stamped, immediately after which you put it in the ballot box. Only ballots with a stamp on them are counted, eliminating the risk that someone would (quite literally) go ballot stuffing by folding several ballots and trying to get them put in the ballot box; only the stamped one counts, anyway.
Did you not read my post? "One might come up with ways to surveil the booth (whether in general or through the coerced voter), but at least we have a chance at detecting this."
We have a chance at detecting purely electronic hackers also. For example, hackers made 574 attempts to connect to one of my servers as root since the logfiles were rotated.
This idea that physical is somehow categorically better than electronic is just magical thinking.
Let's say I'm an abusive husband. If my wife has the choice of voting online, I can force her to choose online voting, make her vote at home and in front of me, and nobody has any way of detecting my coercion. If my wife has no choice but to go to a polling booth, election observers absolutely do have a chance of detecting my coercion.
> This idea that physical is somehow categorically better than electronic is just magical thinking.
No, it's a demonstrable fact. You have created an "electronic hacker" strawman here. The problem I am raising is that of coercion, not a man in the middle. You have not been able to provide any means of mitigating it when not using a physical polling booth.
Problems such as "electronic hackers" are only problems on top of the problem of vote coercion, which is clearly made much worse with any ballot system that does not use physical polling booths.
You won't go very far by tampering with a single vote. Try coercing with 10 thousand people, and see how easily you are tracked.
The benefit of online votes is that coercion and data stealing are the only flaws we must take care of. Instead of this huge structure trying to cover for all the flaws of paper, we can focus on those two well specified ones.
Again, let me point out communist terrorists have already hacked this. Selfie in the voting booth. "Chance of detection" is just an assumption that some magic occurs because things are physical.
Your hack also works for absentee voting, which we already have. Do you propose eliminating that as well?
The good thing about physical is that it demands much more effort to tamper with results.
Also, the mechanisms we put in place to prevent tampering are easily understood by just about anyone, not just people with CS degrees - which lends credibility to the process, which I find to be a benefit.
This is already accounted for in many voting systems. You can either get a new ballot after you take the picture as "proof", or as a last resort you can spoil your ballot.
I think a big chunk of the opposition to electronic voting by techies is simply a failure to recognize that physical systems can also be hacked. Which is of course silly - the only time I voted, I did so fraudulently.
(The lack of voter ID laws in NJ made it very easy. To prove a point to a friend that voter ID laws allowed fraud, I voted as my friend. Then he voted as me. I won the bet.)