What good is a paper audit when the ballots can be mixed with boxes of “mail-in votes” that ultimately get separated from their envelopes, breaking their chain of provenance? You can keep counting them, and the count will match each time, but can you verify that each ballot you’re counting originated from exactly one registered voter?

If you think this is evidence of a secure election, I have an unpickable lock to sell you. Anyone repeating the talking point that this was “the most secure election ever” sounds like a partisan hypocrite, especially when you can find videos of Democratic Congress members warning about the security of elections as recently as in 2017.

Or, maybe it’s a coincidence that polls asking questions about election security – an objectively non-partisan topic – find a distribution of opinions weirdly aligned with support for the red or blue team.

Mail-in ballots must be separated from their envelopes. This is the only accepted way to achieve a secret ballot, which is required by constitution or law in most US elections. That is, losing the provenance of the ballot is the point of the voting process.

If only there were some sort of academic discipline... a science of sorts... that spent time solving problems like this.

Alas, anonymous verifiable signatures must be impossible.

Zero-knowledge proofs and Monero have so far proven effective. It is odd how on a tech forum, when you bring up utilizing technology for voting that you are suddenly downvoted.

Let’s say your state makes you vote in person. You’re handed a ballot and fraudulently vote multiple times, undetected by the busy poll workers. But, your multiple votes are detected later when the roll is scanned. The box containing your ballot is numbered, and workers need to manually find and remove your fraud.

Mail-in ballots are no different. A limited, known number are printed. The system prioritizes in-person ballots in case the mailed one is filled out under pressure. Some states forbid unique ballot tracking, using theoretically non-unique identifiers.

Unfortunately there are currently ten states using voting machines without a voter verifiable paper trail (VVPT/VVPAT) in at least some jurisdictions. These numbers are dwindling over time as machines without VVPT are no longer being purchased on a meaningful scale, but most states can afford to replace their equipment only very infrequently. Over the next decade or so most of the non-VVPT machines should hopefully go out of service, this is a policy requirement in some of these states.

Which 10?

Here's your best source on the issue, it's kept up to date year to year. You can drill down to the county level as well. https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...

Note that the map colors DRE w/ voter verifiable paper audit trail as (lightish) red. That's consistent with the prevailing opinion today that DRE w/ VVPAT is inferior to paper ballots with precinct tabulation (because voters do not necessarily actually examine the VVPAT), but does tend to make the current situation look worse than it is due to Nevada.

Not in some states.

None of the big lie states have paperless voting machines. Eg: Georgia prints out an actual ballot for the voter.

They have pictures of all the counted ballots but they are refusing to give them to the public for some reasons.

Which "they" are you talking about?

If you mean Arizona, see Title 16:

> After the canvass has been completed, the officer in charge of elections shall deposit the package or envelope containing the ballots in a secure facility managed by the county treasurer, who shall keep it unopened and unaltered for twenty-four months for elections for a federal office or for six months for all other elections, at which time he shall destroy it without opening or examining the contents.

> The officer in charge of elections shall ensure that electronic data from and electronic or digital images of ballots are protected from physical and electronic access, including unauthorized copying or transfer, and that all security measures are at least as protective as those prescribed for paper ballots.