

This is very true, though I’d argue that Windows makes most of the same assumptions with user accounts. Also, the internal threat model is still important because it’s often used to protect daemons and services from each other. Programs not started by the user often run in their own user accounts with least privilege.
You no longer have 10 different humans using the same computer at once, but you now have hundreds of different applications using the same computer, most of which aren’t really under the user’s control. By treating them like different people, it’s better to handle situations where a service gets compromised.
The question is more about passwords which is mostly down to configuration. You can configure Windows to need a password for lots of things and you can configure Linux to not. They just have different defaults.








Unfortunately that’s not really all you need. It needs integrity too. Need to be able to verify that the output came from the input and hasn’t been modified or tampered with.
Also need to ensure that, despite being anonymous, people can only vote once and can’t vote on behalf of someone else.
Also that whoever is receiving and counting the votes can’t miscount or lie about the count or figure out which votes came from where by decrypting individual votes as they’re received.
The scheme they were using is “Helios” which involves people encrypting their votes such that a group of authorities can combine all the encrypted votes together homomorphically to count them and then decrypt the results without ever knowing any one vote. They then use zero-knowledge proofs to prove that they did it correctly and nobody could have known what any vote was or tampered with any results at any point.
Someone just derped and lost their private key so they couldn’t decrypt the results after they’d been combined…