you sort of lost me here. I will not say it is a bad idea, but it would never work in any country I know. Thee sheer size and cultural innovation required would still need to place an inordinate amount of trust in the system.

Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain

(IIRC Estonia has a nice program where you have a state-SIM and you can vote via telephone, so there it actually might work)

Bitcoin works this way though. It is a set of tools to manipulate a highly abstract data structure. These tools are developed by a minority of the population, but the rest of the population trusts them.

This works because it has value for the folk.

Now you're speaking about elections. Most of the people speaking of e-elections are _mostly_ trying to get to the public that if you could make the elections work electronically - then there's a bunch of other things that could be done digitally too.

One example - company board voting. What if you could be present at any board meeting because everything that is said over there is cryptographically signed by each party thus providing non-repudiation of whatever they said?

What if every newspaper reporter had to sign their articles with their signature which is linked to a news trust network?

Contract signatures. Inheritance.

This is a reply to your:

>> Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain

Little gain is only for people who have no idea of what you can do with "digital".