I have a question that perhaps some expert on electronic voting machines could answer.
Is there any reason why a voting machine could not be set up at the last minute to randomly decide which party lines go to which counters?
If you're afraid, as some people seem to be, that dishonest electronic machines might dump votes, it would be a bad bet to have them do so if one can never know which votes are being dumped.
You can't add votes practically, because the poll checking process is too well organized for that. I don't know any place where every voter is not checked off against a paper list, and the overall count of ballots cannot exceed the number of voters who appear.
Back when I worked the polls in Connecticut, we had a rigid two party system, in which every vote was checked on the lists of both parties, and the mechanical voting machines counted the number of entries as well. The total votes for any candidate could be, and often were, less than the total, since one is not obligated to vote for anyone, but they could never be more.
The machines were also double checked for operation before the election, to make sure that they were counting correctly.
Because the party levers and lines were always in the same order (Democrats had the top lever), there was still some room for fraud in losing the count for one party or the other, but it was small, and as far as I can see, the problem of line familiarity that dictated this for mechanical machines could easily be addressed by allowing a variety of connections in an electronic machine.
Here in small town Vermont, we use paper ballots. Every voter is counted going in, handed ballots, observed putting them in the boxes, and counted on the way out. Fraud would require considerable collusion between all the poll workers.
Now electronic machines have some possibility for skulduggery that the old fashioned ones do not, but it seems as if one ought to be able to control that pretty easily.
