There is not hyperbole in the claim that our voting process lacks verifiability. There once was. A few decades ago precincts, after closing their polls, sat, with representatives from each party, and counted the paper ballots as they took them from the bin, in full view of their neighbors, since poll workers were registered voters of the precinct the managed. They were a critical part of the process. Today no poll worker has any idea of how the counts are passed to the state attorneys general, or what the count actually was. The local count was once the legal value unless a recount was requested, and could be confirmed by the stored ballots.
As the precincts count ballots they are placed in secure boxes which are sent, after the count is completed, to secure vaults, never to be touched unless a recount is requested. That connection with the local hand counts becoming the official represented vote provided an audit trail - a chain of ownership for the vote. Today there is no such chain of ownership, no audit trail, and only officials with fiduciary/political interests in the outcome have any idea of the values presumably delivered from each precinct.
The reasons claimed for the changes made to the process were several, but one was the requirement by television networks for real time reporting of the results. What few citizens knew at the time was that the actual tally federal votes was performed at a network-owned corporation, Voter News Service, in New York. Most would question the propriety of having the direction of our republic established by a corporation owned by NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. But cheating with machines is much easier than cheating when neighbors count paper ballots in full view, sign their agreement to the final report, and see the locked ballot boxes to sealed storage.
Absentee ballots in most states are counted by SEIU employees, out of public purview. Presumably-legal observers are often treated treated with hostility and even threats. I was one of those observers in Calif. Is there any chance the SEIU employees would pass on an unauditable vote count not favorable to their future employment or salaries? Their employer the State AG, would have to require a recount, and that won't happen.
Some were surprised that Americans living in Israel voted for Romney by 89%. Israel is one of the countries that uses auditable paper ballots. Personal experience, having very liberal relatives living in Israel, US citizen Jews in Israel do not vote significantly differently from Jews in the US. Israel is a more secular country than the US. More US Jews are conservative.
The assumptions being made about why this or that group voted as they did has no foundation in real votes. We have no idea of the choices made by voters. There are no data that would satisfy the integrity requirements for real statisticians. Our voting system is designed for corruption. Every computer-based vote counting system can be compromised, and has probably been selected because the interested political classes want to preserve their ability to control elections. Today, paper ballots and local human counts might show that we are a very different nation than the media are reporting about. Their reports are preparing us for the changes some would like to impose on us as a nation. They may have succeeded, and corrupted voting processes, as simple as they seem, may be the most important tool in their armory.
Every judge of elections keeps a running count of the number of voters. Every clerk does as well. That count is compared with the machine count, and the submitted machine count is compared with the registered count. "Making" votes is very difficult in our system. Changing votes is another matter; in an optical reader it is impossible in practice for any election official to know that the recorded vote is the same as the vote punched in by the machine. Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible to create or destroy votes in the total counts. If there are a thousand votes, 500 'Pubs could be changed to 500 Dems, but 500 'Pub votes could not be deleted. Nor could 500 Dems be added.
In a dishonest precinct, it's possible (and likely) that votes were added but they would have to be added throughout the day, and all election officials would have to be in on the deception. That happens all the time in Philadelphia. But it is not "that many" votes. [Hold the flames: I'm not saying any election fraud is acceptable. I'm just telling those of you who don't know that even in a very dishonest precinct, adding a lot of votes is pretty difficult as a practical matter.] But anyway, this DOES address your issue, because, notice: our problem is not that too many Dems voted. Their numbers were WAY DOWN. WAY FURTHER DOWN THAN OURS. The problem is that too few Republicans voted. But a crooked election Judge in Philly has NO WAY TO REMOVE Republican -- or anybody else's -- votes.
Second, in States like OH and PA -- which are part of the battleground -- Republicans have poll watchers in every precinct (so do Dems.) They record the voters who have voted. Runners come to the polling places at routine intervals copy the lists, and GOTV phone banks make contact with the people in a precinct who have not voted. So there is in fact an additional check in the system; foiling that system would require Republicans to be involved in deep-sixing Republican hand tallies of who voted. That is NOT realistic.
Romney's people did not contest the vote counts. Therefore we have to assume that in places where the GOTV effort was active, they saw throughout the day that they were not reaching their registered voters and consequently they had no choice but to accept the outcome. If, on the basis of the poll watchers' lists the people who voted was wildly different from the expected polling result, we would be in a Florida situation as of about 10 PM on 11/6. We aren't.