No secret ballot. I don’t think so.
We have paper too and it is just fine, cheap, and fast.
There is no way to secure electronic voting. Just look around today. Electronic systems are always being defeated. At least with paper, you can see the culprit and a large scale cheating effort with proper oversight is going to be plainly visible.
Nonsense. There are plenty of ways to make electronic systems secure. The problem is that nobody seems interested in doing so.
Explain how you would attack the following: A board using nothing but common of-the-shelf components is constructed with a microcontroller that can interface to two flash-based memory cartridges. The board has no non-volatile storage of its own. The controller can only execute code from the first cartridge port, and it is incapable of writing to the media stored there.
Each cartridge has a read-write port and a read-only port, and is constructed in such a way that when a cap is placed on the read-write port it cannot be written unless or until the cap is removed. The cap my be held in place with a number of seals, one for each interested party. Designs for inexpensive cartridge readers are readily available.
The machine should be constructed with a place to affix a number of padlocks (say, four). When the locks are installed, the machine cannot be opened. The cartridges may be viewed through a window, but not tampered with.
Before an election, the initial contents of both memory cards are prepared and published. The "code" cartridge is write-protected and sealed by election judges from all parties, who then use the read-write port to confirm its contents. The "ballot" cartridge is temporarily write-protected, verified by all the election judges, and then loaded into the machine. Seals are applied to hold the cartridges in the machine, and the machine is locked up using a padlock from each party.
After the election, in full view of election judges from all parties, the locks are removed and the "ballot" cartridge is write-protected and sealed. Members of all parties read out the contents of both cartridges and exchange digitally-signed copies. If the copies don't match, each party summons someone else in the party to supply another reader, until the contents of the cartridges are reliably established.
Where's the room for tampering?
It has not been so far. If I put a box, certified sealed, in my truck, then drive to a warehouse where we read the number of paper ballots in the box and take a similar box with the correct number of paper ballots marked for my candidate, apply a certification sticker, and then deliver it to the central office for certification, where is your paper trail?
If that new box is part of a recount, there will be no way to tell if it’s been tampered with since, after all, it has the official paper seal on it with a signature and all of the tallies will match- number of voters at the precinct, number of ballots in the box. The correct box is out to sea.