What experience needs improving in the paper ballots that needs to go beyond paper? What bar needs to be lowered and is that desirable?
Having to set aside a whole day to exercise your rights as a citizen is ridiculous in my opinion and we can do a lot better. (Seeing as the article is about Switzerland, I would say their mail ballot initiative is a step in the right direction but to me it also looks less secure than paper ballots).
Another one is speed. People in this thread complain that some regions in the US only had their final counts for the last presidential election days, if not weeks after the voting ended. How is that acceptable?
In my opinion, when voting is as easy as pushing a button in an application or on a website, the democratic process will have a wider reach and could be used for many more things than the very important ones, like presidential elections or referenda (again the Swiss already do this AFAIK).
It's true that in-person voting is safer. If you mail in your ballot, nobody can verify that you were truly alone and weren't coerced into giving your vote. And of course, it's not rare for e.g. a child to fill out the ballot for its senior parent etc. But it's still hard to commit large-scale fraud, as you'd need to be in control of the mail delivery.
Voting with paper also doesn't have to take all day - a few minutes at a polling station or even less by mail ballot (fraud isn't an issue of paper here).
Also, voting is more than a right, it is exercising authority and that might perhaps need at least some minimum of hurdle in it to get focus.
In terms of broader and more fluid democracy - perhaps, but need to be careful to maintain focus and not end up in something gamified.
Sorry, but why?
In my opinion _any_ method to get more people involved in the democratic process is a win.
It looks to me that you're looking at matters with rose tinted glasses to think for one second that the the people handling the current democratic process feel the burden of consequences for it.
That aside, you seem to advocate a pretty broad change to laws restricting voting when you want all(!) opinions and attitudes to count. What do you see as template there on how to shape the franchise (e.g., what to do about minimum age, insanity)?
I'm fine with the rules as they are for determining who is recognized to vote.
My intentions were for increasing participation in the demographics which are currently legitimate but are being kept out by external factors (they don't have child minders, they can't take a day off work, ie. the poor), or choosing by themselves to keep out of the process (it's lame to vote, all choices are the same, I have better things to do, ie. the young). You can't have a true democracy if these classes of people are underrepresented in your vote.
I just don't see how there is a causal link between these issues and paper ballots. Poor voting implementations could make participation difficult regardless of the voting method, for example. Similarly, political apathy of sorts isn't cured by abstracting away the politics.
The arguments some people are making in this thread that it -shouldn't- take a day, should only take a 'click', are misguided imo. There is value in slowing down collectively, participating in the process, and seeing the results of that collective action.
Reducing it to a task to be completed as efficiently as possible is horribly misguided -- but eliminating the barriers to participate collectively is conversely an admirable goal, which could easily be mostly solved via federal holiday.