I often say that election security is by far the hardest technical problem I've ever encountered. Why? Four reasons:
1) Contradictory critical requirements, particularly vote secrecy vs. transparency.
2) No truly neutral trusted third parties.
3) Election do-overs are generally impossible, so the ability to merely detect problems is insufficient. You have to reliably prevent them.
4) Much of the technology than can manage the complexity of elections is inherently untrustworthy.
@mattblaze the way vote counting is done for Canadian federal elections is pretty neat, I did it once in the early 90s and AFAIK it's still done this way:
After polls close, in every polling station, scrutineers from every party who ran in that riding sit around a table, pass every (hand-marked, paper) ballot around, and everyone records every vote. Once every ballot has been counted, check if everyone's totals match. If so, great, move on to the next box, or go home! If not, start again.
@alexcruise @mattblaze This may create problems with invalidating the ballots by malicious counters. For example in Bulgaria we have some of the counters put lipstick or nail polish on their fingers and invalidate ballots from concurent parties. The prevalent oppinion here is we need to eliminate the human factor - have a machines to count, but also print a paper trail, so the voter can verify how their vote was counted (and put the paper slip into the ballot box). After the elections all or randomly selected sample of the voting boxes are examined and checked their contents match the machine account of the vote. At least that's how it's in theory... Recently the so - called "paper coallition" abolished the machine voting, so they can cheat in the old-fashioned way... That tells me machine voting is a bit more difficult to manipulate.
@extrn @alexcruise @mattblaze I agree. Having a machine help, especially in the more complex elections can be beneficial. Our municipal elections (also in Canada) use a scantron machine, which has a paper trail.