> Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these

> Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these machines. I feel like many programmers could develop something like this in a matter of hours. I have just watched a video recently posted on youtube showing the innards of the Brazilian electronic ballot (which will be used for the 2nd turn elections on the whole country this Sunday): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI (unfortunately, in Portuguese only). He mentions some issues, for instance reliability: with tens of thousands of these devices, some will break, and you must be able to replace the device without losing votes. The device must be resistant to vandalism. The votes must be scrambled after each ballot so that it's not possible to discover who you voted for after the fact. For the same reason, it must be hard to insert a keylogger registering the keypresses. The central counting must be auditable. And so on.