Only an election system with humans, looking each other in the eye and with representatives of each party, residents of the districts they monitor, doing the counting. These precinct workers establish the now entirely absent audit trail we used to have. They open the ballot box in each others presence after the polls close, count the ballots in each other’s presence, with the unquestioned freedom to challenge any ballot being counted. After each ballot is counted it is deposited into a secure box which is sent to secure storage, never to be opened unless a court challange requires a recount.
That is how voting in the US used be, when our voting system had the integrity to allow us to trust that elections actually represented the will of the people.
Today there is absolutely no way to claim we know how people voted. Pundits are kept busy explaining the meaning of data which have no provable connection with those people whose opinions it purports to represent.
Is it clear why our system is a fraud? In a room are forty people who are each willing to contribute #10,000 to an education pool for an endowed environmental chair. There are four colleges competing. The donors write their preferred beneficiary on secret ballots which they hand to an official of one of the schools, whose task is to count and report the result. He works alone in his office. The ballots contain no identifying information. For what reason, other than presumed integrity, would his report be trusted?
Assume that instead of an endowed chair, the decision of the counting authority would determine whether he would be employed and his family have guaranteed health care and generous pension, about twice the salary and pension of those workers in the private sector, what might one assume about his/or integrity? If our system was not modified to permit cheating, it may as well have been. The result is the same. There are so many disconnections with the source of the data, a voter's choice, that the data can have no trustworthy meaning. This writer has spent years looking for faults in data path integrity in scientific instruments. Our voting system fails right at the front end, and, depending upon the state and precinct, at network connections, in every unmonitored room, and, of course, even in the pre-vote registration process. We do not live in a representative republic. We still have local police who maintain some respect for our laws, but our federal government has not been duly elected. To pretend that such is the case is becoming a sure path to tyranny, as the left intentionally destroys our economic system.
Since the 2000 election I've believed it was a huge mistake to abandon the punch card voting system. It was simple, inexpensive and provided a permanent record for a recount if necessary. Put a Dem and Repub in a precinct to keep an eye open for what goes on.
The fiasco put forth by the 2000 recount was totally uncalled for, the people who put on that pathetic show should never be allowed anywheres near a voting precinct again except to vote.
We have now reached the point where it's near impossible to assure an honest election.