Also, don't forget it's a secret ballot, and we do not have any good database of people with public keys in this country. What the hell am I supposed to make of a ledger with 100s of million anonymous public keys? Surely I cannot claim that relates 1-1 with the choices of real people.
You'd have your private key on your 'voting card' (unsure how you call it in the US) with some pw and the machine would just scan it, ask your password. You just need the proof that someone having a private key associated with a public key on a public record has signed, not necessarily know to which public key it is associated.
But there would be so much problems with such a system that I would'nt even know where to start..
There may be other such "straws that broke the camels back", but IMO anonymity is one property that makes a cryptosystem far less intuitive even to me. It's the bridge I never advocate crossing unless people with more security knowledge than me go to great lengths to demonstrate otherwise.
> Your social security number will make a perfectly fine secret key!
Never in its history was it a secret key anymore than your drivers license number, it’s an ID number that can be used to look you up in a DB like a username would be.
The problem is, that despite everyone just instinctively knowing a username needs to be paired with a password (or ideally multiple factors, but that isn’t as universal in understanding yet), no such thing exists currently to pair with your social security number.