>Elections should be independently administered
The key word is "should." Your statement here shows that you either didn't read the paper at all or did and failed to grasp the most basic premise of the entire proposal; using the system elections are not administered by any party. Questions are posed and the system administers the vote collection and tabulating without human assistance or intervention.
>Wishful thinking
Not at all. The tamper resistance is mathematically proven. Unless an adversary controlled 51% of the network hashing power, it's impossible to change history. Of course the voter's client could be compromised but there are measures to get around such issues.
>Irrelevant.
I was responding to your original question of what does this do that paper can't. Now it seems you've moved the goal posts in order to argue with a strawman.
Look, I'm not a "crypto can solve everything" kinda guy, but it seems to me that if there's one area where blockchain tech shines it's in reliably collecting and retaining distributed information in an adversarial environment. That's exactly what voting is so I actually see this proposal as one of the few uses of crypto that's only argument for existence isnt "because distributed."