There are several ways to make ballots-counted public record without compromising the anonymity of ballots-cast. The trick is to assign a unique key to each POTENTIAL ballot-cast, and expose said key only to the voter who casts an actual ballot.
The collecting authority publishes the list of keys that are associated with ballots cast, and the counting authorities for the different items on the ballot (different for local, state, federal, etc. items on the ballot) publish the ballot keys COUNTED for each item for which they are responsible. The voter, who's the only person who knows the key associated with her ballot, can verify that her ballot was collected and counted by comparing her ballot-ID with those listed. Her identity is never known to anyone, but if she finds her ballot-ID in the "collected" list but not in any "counted the way I voted" list she can present the conflict to an alternate counting authority who can challenge the count and go back to the collecting authority to retrieve all ballots and re-count them. A stronger version of this very simple approach requires all "collecting authorities" to assign keys that are unique across all collecting authorities that have common ballot items. This is also very easy to accomplish if every collecting authority uses a common algorithm to assign "random-looking" ballot keys that are a function of the collecting authority and number of potential ballots for which the collecting authority is responsible. The "stronger" version not only allows voter-auditing of the counting of their ballots, it allows third-party verification because the uniqueness across all collecting authorities includes a feature that makes it possible to cross-check the counted ballot count with each collecting authority's collected count because the collecting authority can be identified from the ballot-key. There's a simple key-generator that meets all these requirements, and if anyone is interested in helping me write it up just e-mail me off-list. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
