And yet, with crypto, it is possible for people to verify that the code matches exactly what was written, and it was publicly audited by multiple companies and battle-tested with billions of dollars in value.
UniSwap is a great example. No one ever worries that a UniSwap instance will do something nefarious. That's how the decentralized software SHOULD be. We don't need everyone to verify, but just allow ANY AUDITORS IN THE WORLD to do it.
This is trust in a middleman - the auditors. There is noting trustless about this system. For money, that's probably good enough - it's no less trustworthy than a bank. But it's FAR from enough assurance for national voting.
No. The auditors aren't actually handling your transactions. You can have N auditors sign off on code. And there's also battle-testing it in practice. Comparing that to literal middlemen -- telephone switchboard operators, banks, etc. -- is a category error
No, but you don't know if your transactions are actually safe, or even more so an election, if you don't trust these auditors. The people writing the code, running the servers, etc - you also need to trust them, and they are actually the ones handling your transactions or votes, the exact middlemen.
And again, in any fully electronic system, you need to take into account the whole system, not just one part of it. Maybe Bitcoin or Ethereum or whichever blockchain you like is indeed perfectly safe and very trust-worthy. But if I'm connecting to it to vote from a Windows PC that I last updated 5 years ago, then I'm still extremely likely to lose my private key to my money or have my vote cast for whoever Microsoft or the writers of all the malware I'm running likes best.
There is no way to make electronic voting safe. There will never be any way to make electronic voting safe. Any country doing it is playing with fire. Blockchain does nothing at all to change this one iota.