How would you protect the integrity of the voting process?

[eridani]

6. Auditing. Auditing. Auditing

I agree that paper ballots must be the legal ballot, but I live in a county with 17 different state legislative districts (some of which are shared with neighboring counties), 30+ cities and towns, and four congressional districts. Plus school boards, fire and water districts, etc. And initiatives, and bond issues. Handcounting as the primary method would be preposterous, given that we could never afford to hire the people to do it. We have a very hard time even finding volunteers to to elections watching. Andy Stephenson also lived in King County, WA State, and agreed that open source optical scans with mandatory handcount audits would be the best thing to do.

National registration and national standards mandating open source and auditing would also be helpful.

BTW, hand counting audits (in political units small enough to make this feasible) should not be audited by another hand count. I'd recommend a different check, like weighing the ballots. Banks already think this is a perfectly good way to count coins. Different methods reinforce credibility. Paleontologists are very happy campers if tree ring count dates and carbon 14 dates are within reasonable agreement, because the methods are so different.