[bluGill]

Electronics isn't a problem. The problem is electronics that you cannot personally verify. Every step can be electronic and things be just fine. However if someone decides to cast doubt on any point in the chain it needs to be possible to verify that link actually was done correctly.

With your system I can cast doubt on the entire chain, and there is no problem because you can remove all doubt by taking those paper ballots and counting them all by hand. With several hundred million ballots to count it is obviously expensive (in man-hours), but you can see how to verify that counts. Note that the above verification is something your average idiot with no knowledge of computers can understand and trust.

There exist systems that are all electronic: the voter pushes a button (on a touch screen) and from there on we only have the count. As a programmer I can think of many ways I can make the voting system change a few votes and there is no way to know that the machine's count is wrong.

Part of what make this hard is anonymous votes are important. There are cases in history where someone was forced (with a gun) to vote for someone they probably wouldn't have voted for otherwise. We have solved this problem by having watchers at the polls (from all sides) ensure that nothing funny happens at the polls, and once you leave the booth nobody has any way to know who you voted for.

The above is why I think absentee voting needs to be restricted to those who physically cannot get to the polls on voting day (I'm fine with a voting week or month)