There are ways to increase the security of ballots, before, during and after they are cast, and to provide for a reliable count of votes, which must be verifiable by a genuine "paper trail", a physical record of the voter's intent. By combining a series of new and existing technologies and oversight processes, we can craft what is as close to a tamper-proof voting process as science and human nature will alow.
We have seen the old punchcard ballots ridiculed for their potential flaws in 2000, in Florida. We have seen the dangers of touchscreen voting machines almost everywhere they have been used, at one point or another. Indeed, the state of New Jersey is using them even after having commissioned a study that demonstrated comprehensively they could be easily manipulated to swing an election. And none of the solutions we've heard seem able to guarantee an errorless or tamper-free count. Consensus seems to be building that the best choice we have are voter-marked paper ballots, which ideally can be read by machine, with little to no risk of erroneous readings.
This leads us to the optical-scan ballot, the one where voters fill in little ovals or circles with black ink or pencil, like on standardized tests, and where electronic machines then scan the ballot to see where the marks are made, comparing that with the template it has been programmed to read. There are many potential flaws to this system, but on the whole, given all the criteria legislated to date, and the paramount standard of assessing "the intent of the voter" how can it be necessary to actually legislate that standard?, optical scan is the closest we can come to meeting all requirements, at this time.
I propose here a hypothetical system for casting and counting such ballots with minimal risk of error or interference: The ballots must be optical-scan paper ballots, preferably on paper or cardstock of optimum thickness for being selected and read, one by one, by a machine; Provenance must be guaranteed, so the ideal situation is that only the voter ever touches the completed ballot, then inserting the ballot into a container which will only accept the ballot (as with dollar bills in vending machines) if it is inserted in the proper fashion, so it will be read accurately later;Ideally, when inserted into the storage container, the ballot will be prescanned, and the container will be able to alert a voter to a possible smudge or under-darkened mark on the ballot, so corrective action can be taken before the ballot is officially submitted;To guarantee provenance, the container into which the ballot is inserted cannot be opened by anyone except by court order, and no low-level election officials will have access to any means of opening the container;To guarantee optimal readability, the space inside the container, within which the ballots will be stacked, must not be larger in format than the ballot itself (this provides for the highest possible likelihood that no ballots will enter the scanner at an angle, or in some way off-kilter, thus skewing the scan);
Once scanned, each individual ballot will be mechanically returned to a similar storage container, which cannot be opened without court order (such orders can be provided for as automatic under specific conditions laid out in state election laws), containing a precise number of "counted ballots" in a precisely sized space (as with the first container), optimized for mechanical recounts;Containers holding counted ballots will be stored permanently in a state archive for marked ballots, where they will be available for any future recounts, mechanized or manual; In case of manual recount, a court order would allow the sealed ballot containers to be opened and the ballots extracted by hand, or for them to be mechanically scanned again, then distributed to manual recount containers, from which point, they would need to be recounted and reinserted into sealed containers, with the entire process being overseen by a team of independent observers in any place where this occurs.
Variations to this process could work for certain areas of the country or for certain circumstances, so long as safeguards were in place to avoid any kind of ballot manipulation or disposal. All elimination of or discarding of marked ballots, whether categorized as "spoiled" or not, would be prohibited, and, due to the mechanical security of the count, it would be possible to legislate at least one automatic recount, even in the instance of the first count.