I have studied electronic voting systems and so I was interested in your article about possible subversion of the democratic process in the US (8 November, p 5).
I came to the conclusion that a voting scheme should at least provide assurance to each voter that all votes have been counted correctly, and assurance to the returning officers that they cannot be unfairly accused of rigging the election.
I was unable to create a scheme guaranteeing both confidentiality of votes and that each voter only gets to vote once. In elections in the UK, each voter has a unique number that is recorded with the unique ballot paper number. (I believe that the speaker of the House of Commons has the authority to find out which way people voted.)
In her memoir of Nazi Germany, the late Christabel Bielenberg tells how her husband was a counter at one referendum ...
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