At this point I'm really wondering what it will take before we accept the utter insanity that is electronic voting. Even if there isn't a major breach to the p

At this point I'm really wondering what it will take before we accept the utter insanity that is electronic voting. Even if there isn't a major breach to the point where hostile actors (foreign or domestic) "steal" an election, the confidence in e-voting will inevitably be cast into doubt by the losing side at some point. Guaranteed. How do you audit or recount an anonymous electronic vote? How do you know if a vote cast is recorded as such? How do you know votes aren't wiped at some point? There are two basic options that work perfectly well: - Fill in a paper ballot with pen or pencil marking in spaces for the candidates you vote for. Have a machine verify your ballot. - Vote on a touch screen. Once done print out your ballot and put it in a box. In either case you use some kind of paper that isn't impossible to counterfeit (that's basically an impossibility) but it should be hard enough such that it's nontrivial. That's it. That's all you need to do. Sure local actors can "lose" ballots, ball stuf and so forth but this all has to be done on a pretty local level. You get rid of any potential vectors like a Russian or Chinese state agency changing the result from the other side of the planet because someone forgot to update OpenSSL on one Linux server or someone clicked on a phishing link on an innocuous looking email. Apparently we didn't learn our lessons from unreliable voting methods in 2000 (pregnant chad, anyone?) so I'm not super-hopeful.