Electronic voting machine have the issue of being
potentially hacked (Plus closed source is weird). So in
many
places a paper trail is produced in parallel to electronic
tallying.
However some object to having a paper trail due to tree
consumption.
If we cannot trust voting machine then
what could be
done
to create an audit-able trail is to create a physical
electrical bus standard. An CAN bus for election. :D
Essentially you have a single master input device that
accepts a data card containing your vote settings. To
which
the master device will emit the vote setting on the data
bus.
Attached to the data bus is the master recorder of votes.
But in addition, there are also secondary recorders and
auditing circuits that provides monitoring of the data
stream, as well as displaying to the voter what it sees.
What this ensures is that if you have multiple different
manufactures supplying various master recorder and
auditing and display screens. Then you will have to
corrupt
every single one of them to get away with fraud.
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This also allows for inserting "test votes" module which
appears to be normal votes with normal IDs, but after
voting... you can read the 'test module' and check that
the vote has not been tampered with in the results.