I don't think looking at this as a replacement for the existing ballot system is the right way to look at it. For the kinds of elections that are currently conducted, the current ballot systems may be sufficient, and even preferable, as other posters have argued.<p>In my opinion, research into new, more technical voting systems are not about our existing elections, but about new types of 'assessments of opinion' (AOO) differentiated from the current understanding of an 'election'.<p>For example, current systems assume that 'elections' occur relatively infrequently, are restricted to a certain number of choices, and that the person voting is sharing only their own opinion.<p>However, if we wanted to implement a system in which legislative decisions (proposing and passing laws, let's say) were made by the population as a whole, possibly several times per day, in a geographically distributed manner and supporting both direct and indirect delegation, any system that is intrinsically based on a paper ballot is not a feasible solution. Perhaps we'd also want to support conditional delegation as well; for example, this person receives my vote for topics localized to a 30 mile radius, while person B receives my vote for topics related to privacy protections, and so on (with additional rules for preemption/disambiguation, etc).<p>It wouldn't even necessarily have to be used for traditional governance - it could scale to be used for voting with a group of friends, a business, a shared-interest group, etc.<p>This is obviously a very tricky problem to solve, particularly if you add (optionally?) other requirements such as verifiability, secrecy, and so on. I haven't read the full PDF posted by the author, but I think it's likely that the proposed system solves only a portion of the problems described above, given the complexity of the requirements.<p>That being said, I certainly don't think saying "paper is always the way to go, because it's the simplest" or "these kinds of developments are solutions in search of a problem" are constructive. Addressing the weaknesses of a specific solution is one thing, but saying that the existing ballot system is optimal (particularly given the audience of HN) is a surprising sentiment to see here. Sufficiently long-standing problems (are capitols necessary?) may not be immediately visible to us, but that doesn't mean they aren't there, and we should strive to be open-minded - even towards imperfect solutions.<p>Just my 3 cents.