It is pretty easy to verify that a plane or an elevator behaves correctly. Did it transport its passengers to their destination? Pass. Did everyone die? Fail. (

It is pretty easy to verify that a plane or an elevator behaves correctly. Did it transport its passengers to their destination? Pass. Did everyone die? Fail. (This is obviously simplified). You cannot do that with voting software. To verify the result of a software-based election, you would have to compare the vote counts the software reports with the actual vote counts. But if you knew the vote counts, you wouldn't need the software anymore. There a proposals to get around this issue by storing each voter's decision so they can verify that their vote was counted properly. That would abolish the secret ballot, making it a horrible idea. Even if there were a software-based voting system that could be verified by experts, it would almost certainly be too complicated to be verified by the general public.