The roll book is very, very big, and includes every registered elector in the state. It's alphabetically sorted by last name. Every election official gets their own roll book that they mark names off.
The way you are supposed to do it is ask:
1. "What is your name?"
(flip through the book and find the right page with the last name, usually just takes a few seconds)
2. "Where do you live?" / "What is your address?"
(find the entry with the right name and correct address; if you can't find it, ask them to go to the 'help desk' where a provisional ballot is provided).
3. "Have you voted before in this election?"
(they should say no, and then you initial a ballot and hand it to them).
These books are centrally checked after the election, so people who vote twice can be investigated.
Obviously, voting must remain anonymous. Could it happen?
I'm guessing this would be similar to presenting your SSN. Its troublesome. But regardless, I'd think that we could prove the voting record.
Edit: the more I think about this, I don't think PKI could work. Voter identification would always be available in some way shape or form. I'm not sure this can be solved with tech. Maybe we should just have paper ballets.
Your final conclusion is correct, though. Any system which relies on people having to trust specialist auditors to tell them whether the "correct" software has counted the votes is a system which is fatally vulnerable to FUD and conspiracy theories, even if by some miracle the hardware and software were all open source and worked perfectly.
You present....damn it I've already figured out a half dozen problems with this idea. Give the bill to your buddy and he can vote how he wants.
Do you have any ideas or recommendations to this problem? Every citizen whom is eligible to vote should be able to. Every vote should be counted correctly.
It is a hard problem to solve, and I would guess whoever solves this problem - especially for the long term - would be able to help out humanity in a way that hasn't been invoked in a long, long time.
Ughhh. The world is tough sometimes. Reminds me of Idiocracy - Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr., fuck you, I'm eating.
There are 35k polling stations for 47m voters so each station has to process only ~1,300 voters in 15 hours. Queueing is unusual in my experience. Postal votes and voting by proxy are also options.
If someone found voting at two places, that's dealt with afterwards.