[zeugma]

Bottom line: people in the election protection business (our Secretaries of State and Governors) need to pay a high price in reputational damage and even jail time for failure to ensure the integrity of our voting system.

Absolutely agreed. Penalties for gaming and defrauding the system must be great enough to discourage those wanting to do so.

A technical solution alone is great, but it must be backed up with a strong human responsibility and skin-in-the-game approach.

Also agreed. My purpose in writing this up is to demonstrate a possible technical solution to how to gain and enforce confidence in the system. I figure a lot of folks at individual polling locations might not understand why the number strings must match. However I think they can be convinced that to maintain integrity, they must match, for whatever reason.

[poconopundit]

Great, zeugma. The silver lining in all this is education of the public. It has been sadly missing!

Once the dust settles, a good project of Free Republic is to spearhead creation of an informational website where people can learn the principles of good voting procedure.

It’s really the same thing as protecting your on-line identity with proper passwords and practices. Or stopping phishing attacks in your email.

This is a good use of the brainpower of FReepers.