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Comment by cryptonector

Fully software, even a combo of software and hardware, cannot by itself make elections secure. Think of the Reflections On Trusting Trust problem, the need to verify firmware, etc. You can't ensure that machines _will_ work correctly, but you _can_ verify that they _did_. To do verify the machines' functioning after the fact you have to do it very soon after closing of the polls, and you have to devise a manual, statistical random sampling method where you manually check randomly sampled, marked paper ballots, against the digital cast vote record, then do a digital risk limiting audit to check that the CVR totals up to the machines' reported results. The sooner after closing of the polls you do this, the better the likelihood that any cheating will be caught. I.e., an immediate manual, partial audit of enough randomly-selected polling locations.

That still leaves tons of other technical problems to address, like security of mail-ballots / absentee ballots, the security of ballot boxes used for early voting (because you probably cannot run the above manual partial audit due to then having nightly results available to the public; or maybe you accept that), voter registration, etc.

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