A decentralized blockchain is far more trustworthy than a centralized database in this scenario. Say Russia controls the centralized voting database, they can just edit whatever value they want to say "Putin" and call it a day. It's not public. No one can verify their vote. It's under the control of one party. The entire point of decentralization is to ensure there is public consensus among multiple parties.
There are other discussions about how to allow or incentivize citizens to run nodes, mitigate lost or stolen IDs/private keys, prevent against spam attacks, etc...but it sounds like you aren't even open to discussing those because you equate the word "blockchain" with "snake oil".