>I.e., you can have a paperless blockchain solution IFF you abandon vote secrecy. That is a very tough to swallow pill.
This is false. I know this is a common thought on HN because some formerly popular youtuber did a video about this topic that is still regularly reposted here, but he was already wrong in theory back then and it is certainly wrong in practice today. Secrecy/anonymity and verifiability are no longer mutually exclusive as anyone who is well versed in modern cryptography will be able to tell you.
I'd appreciate some references. That's not because I'm trying to put you down with a request for references, but clearly you have seen them, and I'd like to see them.
Also, you still have to convince the public.
I agree that convincing the public is a separate issue. But on a technical level, these problems are solved. See e.g. this modern implementation: https://github.com/vocdoni/davinci-paper This is a pretty recent one, but the mathematical foundation dates back to the late 80s.
There have also been earlier implementations like this one: https://github.com/benadida/helios (corresponding paper https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...), although it still lacked coercion resistance. But it already uses zero knowledge proofs, which is at the core of anonymous yet verifiable systems.
Thanks. Right, this is zero-knowledge proofs. I expected as much. I think that ZK can be made to work for secure voting, though I don't believe that the public can be expected to understand it. I'll have to read this, but I suspect that there is a way for possessors of secret keys to choose to decrypt ballots and violate ballot secrecy.