Yes and how do you, as a citizen, verify that it's not been tampered with. In the US in the past few elections at least there has been accusations of fraud. And also having this sort of thing makes it possible to do research on the data afterwards... for anyone to do research on the data as it's public. No so with any other system.
If you take the time to enter the voting booth when it opens and verify that the ballot boxes are empty at the start, and stay in the voting booth until it closes, you can verify yourself if everyone put at most one ballot in the ballot box. Later on you can double check if indeed every ballot is counted correctly and can thus conclude that at least your own ballot is counted correctly and exactly once without having to let anyone know what you voted.
> If you take the time to enter the voting booth when it opens and verify that the ballot boxes are empty at the start, and stay in the voting booth until it closes
Too late to edit my own post but please s/voting booth/polling station/ in the parent. Of course every voter should have absolute privacy in the voting booth in order to rule out coercion, but the ballot storage in the polling station should be publicly verifiable.
> nice. election day isn't even a holiday in america.
First of all, there are fifty elections in the US (not counting territories like Puerto Rico and Guam). Each state runs its own elections separately and can decide on their procedures.
Secondly, some jurisidctions already experimented with making election days a holiday. Aside from the fact that this only affects government employees (private businesses set their work schedules at their discretion, just as they do for other holidays), this ended up decreasing turnout, because people ended up taking the previous day off, treating it as an extra-long weekend for travel or vacation.
Third, this is a moot point when most states (34/50) offer early voting, and three more vote by mail, making "election day" rather arbitrary. It's really the last date on which someone can cast their vote. Those states also include three of the four largest states, meaning that the vast majority of people in the US have the option to vote well ahead of election day.
(For the record, the states which have neither early voting nor no-excuse absentee voting are Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and New York)
Usually because there's a fine line between "poll watching" and "poll intimidation" and people generally aren't quite civilized, thoughtful, or well-mannered enough to stay on the good side.
That includes "shouting racial slurs" in your first link.
* Each voter signs off his name on the registered voter list before dropping it into the ballot box. If you want to do multiple votes, it's going to be harder. Anyone can come and watch those.
* Unboxing the ballot is done in public, anyone can come and watch those.
* Counting the votes is public and anyone can come and watch.
Voting on paper is dead simple, has withstood centuries of attacks, counting scales insanely well while attacks don't scale and it just takes one person to notice it and your whole plan goes south.
Whereas electronic voting requires trusting black boxes, more black boxes, and understanding asymmetric cryptography.
First of all, limit the risks. Do runoff elections and split electoral votes in all states (or just don't have per-state elections it makes almost no difference). The risks now is that a 1% error can sway 100% of the votes in 5 states. It's just an unbelievably broken constitution.
If that's "too hard to fix" then there must be at least a fraction of people who don't think this is broken.
In all US states you can sign up to inspect the election, including collection and counting. There are not many requirements other than registration, in California at least. IIUC, in many states, the ballots themselves become publicly inspect able after a certain period of time
