Voting machine integrity through transparency

The only election issue that I can see machinery helping with is the cost of the election. But
it seems very surprising then that richer countries rather than poorer ones are obsessed with
using machinery for this purpose. In the UK we have not yet (in my view fortunately) succumbed
to the temptation to use machinery to count votes. As a software engineer and frequent
participant (candidate and agent) in my local elections there is no way I could trust anything
as complex as a computer to do this job. My city may have plenty of software engineers capable
of verifying the machinery as well as is possible, but why should everyone else trust a small
group of specialists to do this job, when we can and do use a much simpler system that
everyone can see work in front of them ? 

Spoiled paper ballots really are not an issue. We might get one or 2 votes in several thousand
that are genuinely ambiguous - where the common sense of the returning officer takes on the
slightest possibility of being in any way arbitrary. I have seen several hundred deliberately
and some marginally spoiled ballots, without once seeing a case where I have felt the
returning officer made the wrong call. In the very rare occasions where the majority is less
than 2 or 3 (in local elections majorities of hundreds or thousands are more common and in
parliamentary elections majorities are usually 10,000 or more) the recount would subject
spoiled ballots to much closer scrutiny.

The only way I can see computers assisting with the process would be for the computer to print
a paper ballot which is checked by the voter (and which has a "none of these" deliberate spoil
option) and put into an ordinary ballot box, which can be sampled in the event of a large
machine counted majority to verify it, and with all the paper ballots counted manually and
treated as canonical in the event of a very small majority or statistically large enough
sampling discrepancies.

If our American friends can't afford to have a few hundred people in a city of a million stay
up for a few hours once a year to count a few thousand paper ballots each, this doesn't speak
as highly of your commitment to a democratic process as many of your other actions do.