Buying those domains now.....

 

Unfortunately the problem is always in the "make it easy, secure and understandable for everyone" part.
Also, governments are traditionally great fans of security by obscurity. That's what made the last large-scale electronic voting trial in my country a spectacular failure. They spent large amounts of money to advertise the system which was based on smartcards and closed source software - yipieh!

Even if the system would be sound from a theoretical point of view, as long as the actual implementation is not _absolutely_ transparent (ie. I can compile my own voting program with my own toolchain, on my own hardware and can generate my own private key from my own RNG) then I would fight tooth and nail against it! I would never accept government provided smartcards with my personal private key!

I understand that making such a thing workable for everyone is really really hard but there's simply too much at stake here...

I fear however, that most governments are not yet ready for 21st century democracy...

The kind of idea I envisioned is if a private provider produced the entire run of ballots, which worked like lottery tickets.  They had private keys (or pre-signed cryptographic messages) on them, and votes are cast simply by revealing a scratchoff and publishing the message underneath (e.g. it's a QR code that gets scanned).  A vote is void if more than one competing message for the same candidacy is published.

Now, we would have to trust the ballot provider.  But suppose each time somebody voted, they rolled two dice, and double sixes meant their ballot should be submitted for audit.  By this, I mean all keys would be revealed and published and the integrity of the ballot verified... then the voter gets a replacement ballot.  This would mean on average, 1 in 36 ballots would be sacrificed for integrity checks.  Slightly under 3% of the ballots would be subject to audit, but even such a small percentage would make it statistically impossible to rig them.

With all of these voting mechanisms you'd need an authority that initially confirmed your identity, your right to vote and that you didn't sign up for this process before.

There is no magical cryptographic process that would be able to find out who is allowed to vote. If you mean, what is stopping people from selling their vote (their private key), then I guess the answer is probably: nothing.

Then I would double scratch all my opponents votes so they would get thrown out during an audit.

But what would stop the authority from rigging the process?

It could still be abused by the voting precinct.  They could just issue the unclaimed ballots to themselves, or to the highest bidder.

What would stop me from getting multiple accounts so that I could claim multiple tokens and vote multiple times?

Haha, win. 

and if we use a mining pool for every candidate party ?

the miners would vote with hashing power. Opening a web page with an included cpu miner and a drop-down menu where the person could choose the party would solve the voting for non-miners too. All this process could be done in a 24 hours time frame, or more, to have a reasonable view on the public opinion.