What's stopping them from not properly separating the outer and inner envelopes in mail-in voting? Or correlating poll booth entries with checkins? Nothing. The system fundamentally assumes the organization operating the poll is trustworthy.
In case you are interested, the thing preventing those types of shenanigans from happening is volunteer observers from various parties. The inperson and physical nature of things makes it much more difficult to break.
Yes, and volunteer observers could also ensure that the keypairs mailed out to people are never revealed.
1. An airgapped computer running a keypair generation program generates millions of keypairs.
2. This prints these millions of secure keypairs with the keypair facing "downward".
3. In a publicized setting with volunteer observers, the private keys are sealed into envelopes which don't yet have names or addresses on them, and secured with tamper-proof seals.
4. These ballots are sent through another printing system, which adds an address and name to each ballot, at random.
The level of complexity for auditing here is much, much higher than the paper system. How do you verify that the software wasn't backdoored? How do you verify that the computer actually ran that software? What if the hardware had a backdoor? What about the compiler? Even the printers could be compromised.
Normally, I would consider these types of issues simply paranoia, but in this case we are talking about very high stake elections that control the spending of trillions of dollars.
The government will generate these IDs and then mail them to people. Who’s stopping them from recording the mappings?