[kelnos]

How is that observable in the current system? I mailed my ballot in a couple weeks ago, and BallotTrax told me when it was picked up by the post office, and then when it was delivered to election officials and accepted. But that's just an email telling me this; anyone can type up an email and send it, while dropping my ballot into a shredder.

Now, I do believe that my vote was actually counted, but I have no rational basis for this, as I don't have any kind of record or visibility into the process.

I don't think any voting process can actually really tell you that your vote was counted. At the end of the day you're just trusting that the people running it aren't corrupt, or at least that there are enough people involved that keeping shenanigans a secret would be incredibly difficult.

[setr]

Because I could, reasonably, find the damn thing; the evidence physically exists. And the threat of doing so increases trust in the system (even if no one does it), because if worst comes to worst, I can just find the slip.

In a digital system, I'm not finding jack shit. It doesn't exist anywhere except as a counter, I can't check whether it's my vote or randomly created after the fact (after suspicion was announced), and I can't trust the system itself, because it's defined by, developed by, and operated by some random group of people who managed to slap the thing together and make a sale. I can't get in there and check out any of it myself (even as just a vague threat), and the conspiracy group is sufficiently small as to be viable (I only have to "convince", what, 40 people, to cheat the votes?).

What I don't understand is why not use something like the SAT exams -- trivially hardware-counted, but also physically transparent and available -- and solve like 90% of the problem that way?