The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability)

There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process.

If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices.

The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout.

The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.

The tabulating machines or the political machines?

I meant the physical devices. Towards the end of their tenure, there were some statistical irregularities that suggested the gears were failing to roll over correctly, resulting in undercounting.

That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud.

Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The formula is simple: Central, automatic voter registration, easy access to ID cards (the general one, not a voter Id. You know, the thing most use to identify citizens instead of drivers liscences), easy access to polling stations, no Gerrymandering and paper ballots. That's all you need.

Generally the thinking is that there must never exist a mechanism by which you can prove to some other person how you voted, or voters can be coerced into voting a certain way.

> Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?

Because if you aren’t careful you can make it worse.