This is the first step to compromising voting machines:
-dump firmware
-reverse engineer it
-modify it
-replace firmware
Electronic voting is inherently compromised because it is inherently and unavoidably hackable. That is just the nature of electronics. Anyone who has studied software/hardware will tell you this. Some will mention blockchain technology, but that will compromise anonymity.
Voting has to be anonymous (to prevent buying/selling of votes), private/solitary (to prevent coercion), verifiable (recounting) and as public as possible (to enable people to check/oversee the process). Compromising any one of those compromises the whole.
Any form of remote voting compromises privacy (how can you tell there is no coercion?), verifiability (there is no paper trace) and anonymity or publicity of the process is out, too.
With remote voting you can either verify a person voted using video to check … which is still no deterrent to coercion from an offscreen threat but that directly contradicts anonymity, or have someone vote anonymously but then you cannot tell if that person was not alone/coerced. Using electronic/software means also inherently includes (untraceable/unseen) fraud through hacking: there is no protection/proof of lack of MITM attacks or hacks on the client or server. The process is a black box which is thus not public proof of the process being unfraudulent.
For mass voting the only thing which satisfies privacy/anonymity, verifiablity and a public process is a paper vote where the vote is cast in a safe and private space, the paper used leaves a paper trail and the results are counted publically and tallies are made publically and sent over the phone.
This and only this ensures a voter can vote whatever they want (so coercion and vote selling/buying is not possible due to not being able to check what the person voted), it leaves a papertrail for verification/recounting, anyone can witness the counting and ensure it is true and the tallies, due to being made public, can be checked at all steps (voting office, county, region, national) to ensure the tallies don’t change and the addition is correct.
The one ‘problem’ with paper voting is that it takes more time. You might not have results until the next day.
So what?
The only advantage to electronic voting is that it can tally faster … but is in every way more opaque, more open to fraud/interference/hacking and more expensive.
The only people who would advocate electronic voting over paper voting are people who make electronic voting machines or those who want voting to be open to fraud.
