I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.

have you seen any of the research that the US government did on it? Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time. I don't want to write an essay right now but are you truly up to date on this?

Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.

I COMPLETELY DISAGREE. It should be exactly as hard as it is to freeze the cash of bad actors. That's the point of it. I, of course, happen to be a libertarian socialist/anarcho syndicalist. You happen to be a capitalist. You seem to want be in the camp of "you will own nothing and you will like it" but I just so happen to not trust governments and their decisions. I believe in socialism but have seen it co-opted and destroyed by corruption. Anyway, I don't think that those same clearly corrupted governments should have the unilateral right to prevent me from attemtpting to claw enough back from their corruption and greed to feed my family.

What does Monera do?

it is a crypto currency that:

Monero uses three different privacy technologies: ring signatures, ring confidential transactions (RingCT), and stealth addresses. These hide the sender, amount, and receiver in the transaction, respectively. All transactions on the network are private by mandate; there is no way to accidentally send a transparent transaction. This feature is exclusive to Monero. You do not need to trust anyone else with your privacy.

IMO, as a software engineer, leveraging the network effect of Monero was a wise choice. In decentralized systems, the network effect (the amount of unique, separate nodes on a network) is directly correlated to the security of that network. If I were to transact with you in a public place (like a mall food court), you could correlate the presence of other parties in the food court as unique nodes in a network. The more eyes you have witnessing you transaction, the more intrinsic security that transaction has.

Another concept that actually comes into play in cryptocurrency-based systems is that the intrinsic value of that token directly relates to the security of the data in its network. That could be another reason that they chose Monero. Since it already has stable value, it offers a pre-existing and stable security solution.

How do you ensure the accuracy of the data going into the block chain in the first place?

How many people have verified how many people's identity with PGP signatures? Also I'm willing to bet a horribly shocking amount of people would just accept a new key from someone (not necessarily sign it) and trust them regardless.

But it’s not public. It’s a private blockchain. The immutable ledger aspect only matters if everyone can see the ledger. Otherwise we take at face value all of the things you said. Assume they run one node and that one node is compromised by a malicious actor. The system fails. Extend it to a limited number of nodes all controlled by SREs and assume an SRE is compromised (this kind of spearphishing is very common). The system fails again.

Sure, you can creatively figure out a way to manage the risks I’ve mentioned and others I haven’t thought of. The core issue, that it’s not public, still remains. If I’m supposed to trust Proton telling me the person I’m emailing is not the NSA pretending to be that person (as the Proton CEO suggested), I need to trust their verification system.

Unfortunately pretty much no one uses openPGP.