I often say that election security is by far the hardest technical problem I've ever encountered. Why? Four reasons:

1) Contradictory critical requirements, particularly vote secrecy vs. transparency.

2) No truly neutral trusted third parties.

3) Election do-overs are generally impossible, so the ability to merely detect problems is insufficient. You have to reliably prevent them.

4) Much of the technology than can manage the complexity of elections is inherently untrustworthy.

@mattblaze

The only good solution I know is to have a physical box, have everyone check that it's empty, have all the ballot papers put in the box by voters while everyone watches, then shuffle the papers, then take them out and count them while everyone watches.

@neroden @mattblaze Perhaps Matt should have included "scalable to millions or billions of voters"...
@brainwagon @neroden what happens when one of the seals on the box is broken?
@mattblaze @brainwagon @neroden No system will be completely safe from physical harm, so all of the "what ifs" in that regard can only be answered by being very careful about custody and using small boxes so the damage to integrity is limited.