[something]

The problem may be tricky, but surely it's worth solving and doing so publicly. Shouldn't this be doable?

Of all the things i would like to see well-intentioned billionaires do, funding a permanent mission to perfect voting is very high on the list. what greater gift to democracy than provable integrity of its atom?

[eli]

Here's the other thing, though: voter fraud is incredibly rare. Yes, we could do better. But this is not the most pressing issue of our time.

Really, we may be better off launching a PR campaign to remind people that voting mostly works.

[GFischer]

How fast do you forget the 2000 election:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

If you want something less editable than Wikipedia:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1013552.stm

from the outside it looked irregular at least (and some of the voting practices seem very bad).

Here in Uruguay we have a very reliable manual voting mechanism... but if you want electronic, it seems Brazil did it reasonably well (didn't follow the elections that closely, but there's no contest to the voting methods), so you can copy them instead.

Not to mention in the US you don't have direct representation (for the presidential elections), and there are several shenanigans with the voting districts, so, I'd say that voting works less in the US than in several other places.

[eli]

The 2000 election was an ugly mess because damn near exactly as many people in Florida voted Bush as voted Gore, not because of rampant voter fraud.

Better technology could have helped, for sure, but there is always going to be some small margin of error and this particular race was decided by something under 1/100 of a percent.

[bigiain]

It's not jut about whether vote fraud is happening though - its also about the _perception_ of whether vote fraud _can_ happen.

I think it would be worth expending a considerable amount of resources not in the expectation of catching any fraud, but to be able to demonstrate that if there _were_ any vote fraud, there are appropriate means in place to find it.

[eli]

Actually, we already kinda did that. Attorney General Ashcroft made voter fraud a top priority for the Department of Justice. Yet there were very few convictions nationwide, and nearly all of them were for honest mistakes.

[something]

exactly. to a cynic, of which there are many in the younger population that tends not to vote in the US, "mostly works" can mean "doesn't work" (...so why bother?)

if you KNEW the system was perfect, that alone might be reason to participate.

[MichaelGG]

You assert that fraud is incredibly rare -- how are we to know? Did all places start issuing paper receipts that were tallied against the electronic count? Isn't part of the problem that we have no idea how bad electronic voting fraud is, be it prevalent or nonexistent?