I like the ram only aspect but I wonder if the risk of losing all that data in a power disruption is worth it? Seems like it would make a temptimg target for "accidents" in areas where many people vote a certain way and some group wants to disrupt this process. Voting in the US is already a huge ordeal of waiting in line for hours, a lot of those people probably can't / won't come back to revote if the volatile memory erases the machine data.

Just rescan the ballots.

The only truthworthy system is built on mutual distrust (checks & balances). For instance, while I was a poll inspector, everything required two participants, representing both sides. And all actions be done in public.

Every secure system is going to rely on some source of trust. Wheather that’s certificate issuers for SSL, a non-biased Judge, or the trust of the developers working on the bitcoin protocol, trust doesn’t just emerge purely from systems, there is always some root source based on societal norms.

If you were king, there wouldn't be voting in the first place.

Actually, just for kicks, you might find it interesting to know that quite a few historical monarchies were essentially democracies with extremely limited enfranchisement. A setup where - instead of having a bloody "game-of-thrones" civil war to decide the king - they instead had a large body of nobles vote on the king, was actually pretty common.

In fact our Electoral College, as a name, comes from one of these - during the medieval age, in the western heartland of europe (vaguely covering parts of france, switzerland, germany, italy), there were a bunch of little fiefdoms led by nobles who banded together into a big federation called the Holy Roman Empire. They all collectively voted on which noble would become Emperor, and it took several hundred years before one family was able to bend it into being hereditary.

I disagree that you can call any situation with such limited enfranchisement a "democracy".

This is basically still the case in the Vatican, Malaysia and Cambodia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy#Current_uses

I guess the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Sweden are just dreams. I suspected something might be up with Belgium, but I had no inkling about the others.