It's pretty clear that the voting machine manufacturers are doing an awful job, and not even the basic security they need, but there are some particular difficulties to voting.
The major benefit of financial systems is that you can keep detailed logs and then audit them after-the-fact to figure out exactly what happened that is a problem. By the nature of secret ballots you can't have detailed logs for auditing, so the best you can hope for is printing something out on paper for the voter to verify.
Even if you have a paper ballot printed out you have the issue of most people not bothering to read what's printed on it (which, given the number of people on a US election ballot, I don't blame them for). You also have the issue of how to handle the case where the voter either made a mistake or there was a computer error and they need to change their vote from what is on their paper ballot. All of these issues can be solved, but there are a lot of them and each one you have to account for makes the human and computer protocols for voting more complicated, which is a serious issue.
The major benefit of financial systems is that you can keep detailed logs and then audit them after-the-fact to figure out exactly what happened that is a problem. By the nature of secret ballots you can't have detailed logs for auditing, so the best you can hope for is printing something out on paper for the voter to verify.
Even if you have a paper ballot printed out you have the issue of most people not bothering to read what's printed on it (which, given the number of people on a US election ballot, I don't blame them for). You also have the issue of how to handle the case where the voter either made a mistake or there was a computer error and they need to change their vote from what is on their paper ballot. All of these issues can be solved, but there are a lot of them and each one you have to account for makes the human and computer protocols for voting more complicated, which is a serious issue.
Here's a good article on it from Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/getting_out_th...
The main thing he recommends are:
- Open Source Code
- Making voting rules uniform
- Paper ballots printed out which are used for recounts
- Simplify the interfaces, registration process, etc.