For a nat'l election, sure, there's no way to audit the whole thing. And the various local paper trails are of varying quality, as the hanging/dimpled chad business showed. Even so, those were still better the touch-screen/absolutely unauditable systems.
I don't have a silver bullet and don't deny that it's a tough problem. My suspicion is that we'd get further with a standard for a paper ballots rather than fooling with stuff like the MS Access based systems that Diebold sells. I don't mean to imply you like that stuff either; just saying I'm more comfortable with the older physical systems, despite their problems.
> The real challenge for any voting system is to get all of these right:
>
> - Only those allowed to vote can vote
> - Those disallowed from voting can't vote
> - Voters can vote at most once
> - Votes have to be auditable
> - Voters can't be identified from their votes
>
> The last one is important; you need to be able to prove
> that you voted and have the voting system prove to you
> that it accepted, understood, and counted your vote, but
> you can't allow people to make lists of who voted for who,
> because this has been abused in the past and has led to
> intimidation of the voters.
>
> Add this all up and it's a very tricky thing to do correctly.
Certainly tricky to automate the whole thing. And the first two criteria aren't just technical/procedural. Why shouldn't someone who committed a felony and did their time lose their vote?
Curtiss