For justified trust and credibility it is critical that our elections be publicly verifiable.
I don’t have the original quite. A story about prisons claimed that officials look at a prison as a jug of water. Even with a small pinhole leak, the water will get out. They look for the slightest weakness in the prison, assuming prisoners (with lots of time on their hands, collective wisdom, and little to lose in trying) will find any weakness, no matter how small, difficult, and time consuming.
That is how we should look at voting systems: electronic, Internet, mechanical or manual. If there is a weakness in the system, someone motivated will find it and exploit it. When it comes to attaining publicly verifiable results, recounts, and audits, any opening for breaking ballot security or transparency, someone motivated will find it and likely exploit it
For more details, review our Common Sense Series post on Public Transparency and Verifiability <read>
