Ya, good question. This stuff is confusing and no one explains it properly. With a DRE (eg a touchscreen) the legal ballot is the memory card. The VVPAT is lik

Ya, good question. This stuff is confusing and no one explains it properly. With a DRE (eg a touchscreen) the legal ballot is the memory card. The VVPAT is like a log file printed to a cash register paper roll. VVPATs are not the legal ballot of record. Nor are they used for tabulation. Some jurisdictions may use the VVPAT for recounts or audits, but I wouldn't know. In other words, "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail" is a lie; It's not used for auditing, and most voters don't even look at it. The implementation of VVPAT isn't really intended for tabulation. It's thermal paper, easily damaged. There's no standardized format. There's no gear for scanning it. The content doesn't even look like a ballot. Also, with the Australian ballot system, private voting and public counting, there are no receipts. (Whether or not DREs and postal ballots qualify as Australian ballots is another discussion.) I think maybe a ballot marking device (BMD) would fit your goals. The UX is like a DRE. But a BMD generates an actual ballot. That is then treated like any other ballot, fed into a separate tabulator. BMDs do not tabulate. I think BMDs are great. I'd bet that every election integrity activist would agree. -- Every statement I make should include a "YMMV" caveat. Every jurisdiction (state, county) can potentially do their own thing. Worse, the details (gear, laws, rules, procedures) keep changing. So there's always a lot of thrashing getting everyone onto the same page. Please keep asking questions. None of this stuff is intuitive, or works how people expect. It took me years of intense effort to get up to speed, which shouldn't be the case.