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I feel that our fears are misplaced towards the wrong kind of voting machine, the one that collects the vote. The other kind, the one placing the vote, is far easier to manipulate. Facebook and Google have the mechanisms at their disposal to influence elections globally, and within a couple of election cycles could probably have the world's democracies more aligned to the interests of the US.

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That's what I was thinking, although I don't think Google and Facebook are a problem as they can only provide slightly different choices from within a narrow range that people are already interested in. It's the relentess torrent of brainwashing across all media which frames people's opinions and doesn't allow them to think seriously outside of the narrow choices (2 party system, pro/anti [issue]) which ensures that there'll never be change which actually makes a difference (ie the environment, religious crazies controlling nuclear weapons, increasing gulf between rich and poor, companies subverting democracy via lobbying and trade agreements).

Can't you do something with multi-stage voting on multiple independent machines? A way to do error correct coding and consistency enforcement such that no one malicious machine can successfully alter a vote?

I'm thinking smartcards could make it reasonably easy to use, where you simply repeat your vote to some degree and where the chip verifies that the voting machines are all saying the same thing.

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