The answer to the problems with voting machines lies in the same place as do all the other answers for democracy, although in this case it's a bit more specific. It lies with the people. People who are not only willing to raise the issue of voting machine problems, but are willing to work for an answer.
Read on....
There is is an excellent mechanism in industry for developing standards, the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI. Although you might not realize it you are at this minute using dozens or hundreds of ANSI standards.
Part of the ANSI standards process is the public review. Once the standard has been initially developed it must be sent out for public review for a period of time that is commonly 60 days. Every single comment that is recieved during this period has to be read and responded to by the group writing the standard. The group itself is required to document it's balance of stakeholders and try to achieve a balance of interests.
I'm not proposing an ANSI standard for voting machines at this point, but if this develops enough momentum it could happen. Maintaining ANSI accreditation is a bit of effort. And some standards may already be out there, but they obviously are lacking, since we still have so many problems.
That does not mean that a standard for voting machines could not be developed. Governments love standards, because all the work is already done.
So what I'm proposing is a standard for the operation and performance of vote tabulating equipment. The standard would address:
-User interface and correct interpretation of user's intent
-Define an acceptable error rate to test against
-Define error detection and correction methods
-Security of initialization
-Vote tabulation methods
-Define minimum acceptable capacity of vote tabulation
-Security of the tabulation
-Permanent recording requirements
-Labeling and marking of equipment
Anyone else interested in working on this? A standards making task group is just about the purest form of democracy-the good and the bad. But it's a fun.