>You can ameliorate that using electronic voting machines (which I disapprove of);
Why? There's a wide spectrum of voting machine implementations that go between "ballot printer" (basically zero concerns of hacking) and "opaquely tallies votes with no audit trail". When it comes to complicated voting schemes like this, having a machine greatly improves the user experience by allowing the ballot to be validated before it's dropped off.
Why do I disapprove? I take it that's what you're asking.
We do hand-counts here. I know pretty well how they work, and people trust them. I'm not familiar with all the varieties of electronic voting machine; but as far as I'm aware, none is certified by any federal agency, and most (all?) are proprietary. I'm not keen on having commercial businesses (with commercial secrets) involved at the heart of vote-counting. Instead, I'd have central government specify how voting machines must work, and certify that each proposed model meets specifications. Really, the innards of these machines should by law be exposed to scrutiny by the general public.
There's a lot of distrust in the USA voting procedures. Disenfranchisement is routine, and it's also routine for candidates to attack the voting system when they lose. That's partly because people don't trust electronic voting.
I'm not from USA, but I think the USA should enact voting laws that are uniform across the country. I think it's nuts that voting laws are state-by-state, even for federal elections. I don't understand why former slave-states should get to make their own voting laws for federal elections.
Why? There's a wide spectrum of voting machine implementations that go between "ballot printer" (basically zero concerns of hacking) and "opaquely tallies votes with no audit trail". When it comes to complicated voting schemes like this, having a machine greatly improves the user experience by allowing the ballot to be validated before it's dropped off.