(01-22-2020 01:33 PM)greyowl72 Wrote:  The dual hardcopy/machine voting that Tang mentioned above seems like a reasonable approach. Except...Let me relate a real-life incident that occurred out here this past November in a hotly contested school bond election.
The dual system was in place. New electronic voting machines were being used. Late on election night the winner was announced. The bond had won by abut 16 vote. (26,000 votes cast). Lots of hurrahs. Lots of grumping. But wait.....the out of town ballots hadn't been counted!! After those were counted the next day...the bond issued FAILED by 24 votes. As you can imagine, after not too much discussion, a recount ensued.
The machine recount tally was unchanged. But the paper ballot was a bit off...by 850 votes!!! WTH?? Lots of head scratching. Lawyers getting ready. The State getting involved. Wait....turns out in the elections office there was a mysterious sealed ballot box with paper ballots, but nobody knew where it came from. Was it from the bond election? Or was it from elections past? A court order was obtained. The box was opened with much ceremony in front of election officials, lawyers, state officials, media...yep. the missing votes were in the box. In the confusion and crush of election night they had been literally put up on a shelf and forgotten.
Needless to say, everybody on both sides is pissed. And the outcome of the fiasco has been to undermine the confidence of everybody in the election process itself. And it wasn't fraud, or hacking it was human error.
And by the way, by law the election results had to be certified to the state within a specified period of time. And they were. However, those certified results are in conflict with the final count (supervised by a court-appointed judge). Can you say re-election???

Just thought I'd share.