I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards

I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court) - Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case. - Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts. - Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short. - Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location) - The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules. - The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting. - the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks) - as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room - the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard - results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics - all the results, down the voting district level are available online - I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website - it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not - there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people. TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total