The best system in my opinion would be:

Voting Requirements

• Paper Ballots
• In person
• ID required₁
• States must maintain clean voter rolls
• Two day voting window (I think 1 can just make it too difficult for some people)
• Require businesses to give their employees a reasonable amount of time to vote
• Stricter absentee voting rules, and more absentee voting scrutiny if the total absentee count has the possibility of swinging the election

₁ Enough with the requiring IDs is racist BS. If this is really an issue, and would disaffect legal voters it can be solved. Make it so you can get an ID when you vote. Don't have the right documents? Have shuttles available to take you where you need to go to get what you need. The cost of that would be a pittance compared to having secure elections.

Chain of custody

• Chain of custody requirements for all ballots, with both parties present
• All counting and chain of custody must be filmed₂, and video must be publicly available. Receipts of all counts must be shown on film for every batch counted
• Breaches of chain of custody, as well as missing or malfunctioning video results in a mandatory audit

₂ Filming would show ballots but not allow you to read them, however receipts should be shown to the camera and be readable, with rules about not blocking the view for an extended period of time.

Counting

• Hand counted (separately by each party)
• Machine counted to verify
• Counting can only be started once voting closes, not before
• Only accept a count if all numbers match, both hand counts, and machine (and this can be done in batches, then final tallies on those batches)
• Consistently wrong and mismatched counts can result in an audit and investigation of the election workers involved
• All batches and final tallies need physical receipts
• Publicly available receipts online
• Allow public to view the physical receipts upon request
• All votes must be counted within 24 hours of voting close
• Failure to count the votes in time results in a mandatory audit

Election Workers

• Mandatory background checks on election workers
• Any election workers caught breaking any rules, bans them from ever working in an election again, and should be prosecuted where appropriate with harsh penalties.
• Possibly some kind of term limit like requirement, or maybe some kind of forced rotation for positions being held (having the same person in charge for decades breeds corruption imo)

Auditing

• I'm a fan of the auditing procedures done by the CyberNinjas
• Audits that discover malfeasance should result in criminal charges where appropriate, and possible lifetime bans for election workers involved

Certification

• No precinct can certify their results if they are being audited, until the audit is complete

Results

Results should be known the next day after counting. Ideally everyone followed the rules and no audits would be required, but I think that will be inevitable. Elections would need to happen on a timeframe where some audits will be expected, and we have enough time to finish those audits before the newly elected would take their positions.

Cost

Clearly a lot of this stuff would be expensive. However, our government wastes billions of dollars on absolute BS. We could easily pour in enough money into our voting system to make all of this possible, and I think most taxpayers would agree it would be money well spent, in order to have confidence in free and fair elections.

Conclusion

I think our election system is broken and easily abusable, and I think most people would agree. What do you think about a system like this? Too expensive? Too hard? Missing something? Let me know what you think.