Voting machines do have one benefit: consistency. So use them for that in a way that limits the impact of any potential compromise of the system or makes that compromise obvious.
- Use a digital voting machine to display the candidates and any ballot questions, localized to different languages depending on local demand. Model the UI after something many people have experience with: the touch-screen ATM.
- Have those voting machines print out ballots with the voter’s selection printed in human-readable and machine-readable form so they are consistent (no questions about “Is that Scantron bubble fully filled in”, “This person wrote in a vote for Bernie Saunders – did they mean Bernie Sanders?”, etc.)
- Print the voter’s selection in a machine-readable form that can be interpreted by a smartphone app (say a QR code) so voters can check that the two forms match.
With this approach, most voters can confirm that both the human-readable and machine-readable records accurately capture their vote. The ballot box can count the machine-readable form of the vote and accumulate the data quickly. In the event of a recount (due to a close race or as a spot check on the accuracy of the machines) count the human-readable votes.
Speed: the ballot box can quickly tally the machine-readable votes.
Accuracy: the voter can read the human-readable vote and can use a smartphone to check the QR code. In the event of a recount, the human-readable vote will be printed clearly and consistently on the ballot and can be compared against the machine-readable vote. No hanging chad scenario.
Detection of interference: there’s a paper trail. If someone compromises the machine to change the ballot questions, you could print the one-line summary of each question on the ballot itself, so the voter knows what they voted on.
Price: you need a printer and a touch screen computer/tablet for each voting station plus one ballot box (if your polling place gets enough votes to make hand-counting infeasible.) The printer and computer/tablet probably cost a couple hundred bucks combined at Best Buy, and you could use them for other purposes outside voting season. The electronics in the ballot box would probably be the most expensive piece of this system, but you’d need it (or something like it) to tally the machine-readable votes. If you wanted to just count the human-readable votes in a location that doesn’t have a lot of voters, you don’t even need that.
