The ideal attributes of democratic voting procedures are in conflict, necessitating tradeoffs
Any good voting process has desirable attributes. Those can be summarized by three adjectives:
Integrity refers to whether the election correctly reflects the true choice of every participant, without intimidation or incentivization. It also encompasses techniques that prove or disprove integrity.
Anonymity refers to the ability of participants to cast votes anonymously.
Remotability is a newly coined word, referring to whether participants can, and the processes required to, participate without appearing at designated physical locations. "Remotability" has become very important during the Covid19 pandemic across many systems and processes. However, elections in many jurisdictions have had some remote capability for years, commonly referred to as an "absentee" ballot.
Recent attention to electronic and blockchain-based voting processes allow researchers to analyze practical systems using clean, theoretical models. This activity has made it clear that these attributes are fundamentally opposed in many respects, in ways that perhaps the messy possibilities of physical presence and paper ballot election processes have previously obscured.