So you double-count, you checksum (our table just tallied 100 ballots, do our vote counts sum to 100? good, keep going), you checksum some more (does our total vote count amount to the number of registered votes in this poll station), you film everything, and ideally you do this with volunteers drafted on election day.

This isn't rocket science.

More importantly, you want your system to be bulletproof before it's audited. By the time you're talking about audits, the populists have already started flooding the zone.

The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".

If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.

I have to seriously disagree on the particulars, here.

The Russia allegations ranged from "Russia hacked DNC servers/accounts to interfer in favor of Donald Trump" (demonstrably true in several instances) to "Russia hacked voting machines" (very probably false). And then in 2024 the DNC quickly accepted election results.

By comparison, Donald Trump still claims that he legitimately won the 2020 elections, the majority of his base still believes it, Fox News spent years spreading that message even though their own journalists thought it was bullshit, etc.

I maintain that this is a systemic problem and a better system would not have given Trump the leeway to do this, but let's not pretend it's a bipartisan issue.

> The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well.

No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.

The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.

Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.

If you're referring to ICE, that's gross hyperbole, and honestly a little insulting to people who live / have lived in regimes with an actual secret police.

The US is still a rights-based state, which means that when they arrest someone (legitimately or not), lawyers and human right advocates can eventually track them down.

When a secret police disappears someone, they actually disappear. Families can spend years wondering if their loved one is still alive, or was murdered by organized crime, or ran away, or was secretly taken by the state. The US these days is pretty bad, but it's nowhere near that bad.