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This is a forum populated with thousands of smart and talented engineers all discussing the absurdity of US voting systems and suggesting great fixes. There is clearly a problem to be solved here—and it might even be lucrative to solve it. Seems like a reasonable idea for a startup company: making cheap, audit-able polling devices that can be sold to any county in the country and any country in the world. Someone here should take a stab at it.

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Or, as engineers, we can propose an existing solution that is trustworthy and well-proved: pen and paper.

It has proved its reliability in thousands of elections. It is cheap, universally-understood and basically impossible to subvert to a meaningful level of impact. It is understood by everyone who can vote.

Democracy doesn't need us to show off how clever and creative we are. It needs boring, simple, reliable mechanisms.

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