[Slippery_John]

Why not have paper ballots that can be read by a machine? It doesn't get around the issue entirely, but you can always look at the physical ballots for a recount. It's a lot harder to tamper with an election at scale when you need to handle physical ballots.

Or just abandon electronic voting entirely. Ireland tried electronic voting, but scrapped it for just these reasons. You could even keep the ballots in a machine-readable format for sanity checks if necessary.

[danaris]

In New York State, we have exactly this: optical-scan ballots. We fill in the bubbles of the candidates and issues we support with a black marker, then personally feed them into a voting machine that both securely stores and automatically tabulates them. If they needed to be hand-recounted, that could easily be done.

The one significant improvement I would prefer in this process is verifying on the optical-scan machine's screen which options you have voted for, with the option to retrieve your ballot and fix it if anything shows up wrong.

[dbcurtis]

My precinct in Sunnyvale has been doing this for decades. Paper ballot, marked with ink (no “hanging chad”). Ballot is machine readable, and cheap. And easy to process. And has no reliance on high tech on voting day — you could vote by candle light if the power goes out.

[ddingus]

This!

I don't have any real concerns about machine counting given a physical record, basic statistical means can tell us all we need to know.