It is absolutely 100% not overblown. Voter punishment and suppression is a well established practice in many places. India's vote tallies for example have evolved to a pretty complicated system, because local powers were even instituting collective punishment on whole villages if they voted "badly". So, the vote counting system had to be adjusted to extend vote secrecy not just to the personal vote, but even to entire counties.
This is a very real problem with a well known history. Even in the USA, gerrymandering is facilitated by this kind of information. If votes were mixed during counting so that you didn't have information about vote counts in each polling place, it would have been considerably harder to come up with the crazy districts being used today in many places. Having personal identification of each voter would definitely have creative uses as well.
And as for bribing, in this very election we have Elon Musk publicly announcing he's giving out money to people who essentially pledge to vote (with some attempts at plausible deniability for committing this federal crime). I'm sure smaller and less loud election influencing is being attempted all the time - but it's hard to do if people can outright scam you and vote differently than what you paid them. Having an online proof of your vote would open up the floodgates to this at a massive scale. And there are plenty of people poor enough to see this as a lifeline.
This is a very real problem with a well known history. Even in the USA, gerrymandering is facilitated by this kind of information. If votes were mixed during counting so that you didn't have information about vote counts in each polling place, it would have been considerably harder to come up with the crazy districts being used today in many places. Having personal identification of each voter would definitely have creative uses as well.
And as for bribing, in this very election we have Elon Musk publicly announcing he's giving out money to people who essentially pledge to vote (with some attempts at plausible deniability for committing this federal crime). I'm sure smaller and less loud election influencing is being attempted all the time - but it's hard to do if people can outright scam you and vote differently than what you paid them. Having an online proof of your vote would open up the floodgates to this at a massive scale. And there are plenty of people poor enough to see this as a lifeline.