When I brought this to your attention, I did so simply because I genuinely thought that it might be something you might be interested in, since you have a background of having worked with some e-voting issues. I see now that you are PROFOUNDLY uninterested, so I will let an old dog go back and lay down in the shade
I will not disturb you further.
Thanks for the thought, but indeed I am profoundly uninterested on any vote-from-home proposal. That is like a water-powered car or a gamma-ray fly killer: a bad idea in itself, independently of the technical details. I will not waste time reading such proposals.
What many "puppies" fail to realize is that the only purpose of an election is
to convince the losers that they do not have enough support. Note the emphasis on "losers". It does not matter if the election convinces the majority, the media, the election committee, the UN observers, a jury, a platoon of academics, or a gang of zit-faced geniuses. If the losers think that they have been robbed, they will not accept the result and may resort to violence or other non-democratic means. Elections were invented precisely as a smart, efficient and painless alternative to those more primitive means of settling political disputes.
Complicated crypto-based systems generally fail on this count. The losers cannot be expected to trust a system that requires a PhD in computer science to analyze. Especially if they ask a honest cryptographer and learn that the fundamental tools of public-key cryptography -- SHA, ECC, RSA, etc -- have never been proved to be secure, theoretically or empirically.
On the other hand, everybody can understand paper-backed e-voting, enough to trust it. In Venezuela, for example, at least twice the opposition tried to start a civil war and depose the government by force by claiming that elections had been rigged. Fortunately their voting machines had paper backing, the recounts confirmed the result, and convinced the opposition that they were indeed the minority. No matter what one thinks of their government, most people in Venezuela would rather have them in power than a civil war.
Since I have been involved with this issue, at every election I get calls from minority parties and candidates who are sure that they have been robbed by the system and want to know what they could do about it. Unfortunately, with a purely digital system, the answer is nothing. Even in cases when the evidence of fraud was fairly strong, appeals were flatly dismissed because the entity that judges such matters (TSE) is the same entity that buys the equipment and manages it. Twice in the past Congress determined the use of paper backup, but twice TSE reversed the decison -- once by lying to the party leaders and suppressing public debate, the second time by having paper backup declared inconstitutional. Whereas the German Suprme Court ruled that purely electronic (DRE) voting is inconstitutional, because the citizen has the right to understand how his vote is counted.