With all these ways to cheat, proposing a new way to fix it should be something we think about as well.
Machines aren't gonna go away, nobody wants to wait weeks for results.
Machines should scan ballots, to image, and the image should be public.
Everyone can see the ballots and count them if they choose to.
Ballots should be serialized and when you're given a ballot you should get a receipt for that ballot.
If you want to check your ballot online, you can go and look it up, see how it was scanned and also see how your vote was cast.
Machines shouldn't be doing magic and spitting out numbers. I wanna see the ballots as an image and I'm sure theres plenty of ways to process images with different programs to come up with results.
If everyones program comes up with the same number, then we can agree.
Yes, but, I am from the UK and our ballots are usually quite simple compared to US ones. In the UK, you might get three or four names and you need to mark the one you want with an "X".
However, in the US ballots look more like this: SAMPLE Official Election Ballot It is about 15 ballots in one. Maybe the US should use a different piece of paper for each one?
So simple counting of pieces of paper is not currently possible. You need to keep running totals of each section as the count progresses.
As for using machines, it would be possible to subvert any machine if you threw sufficient money at it. The best you could do would be to keep it really simple. So simple that a non-techie could spot an issue. That is hard to do in these days of "black boxes."