We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you're willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you're okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don't know how to set that system up.

Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we'd need some sort of framework to prevent that.

Exactly! I mean, the problems with electronic voting are mostly technological, and thus can be overcome. We also don't need absolute security for every single vote, especially if we have multiple votes on the same things.

To take the Brexit example, there could have been a subsequent vote about how it should be done, then a last minute vote to decide whether or not to go ahead with the final decision, and then afterwards a vote in review of how it's going and whether to change course - along with votes on trade agreements and everything else that would be different. Even for people who didn't vote seriously to begin with, they're going to take it more seriously as time goes on.

We could have digital voting for most day-to-day things, like local ordinances, but then big decisions can be done securely with paper and pencil (no pens = no swapping for one with disappearing ink).