A voting machine is a device to record and register votes to be counted as per any voting system, typically without a ballot.

Some view it as an even more secure improvement on a secret ballot and the manual systems of human vote counters and scrutineers. Spoiled ballots are eliminated.

However, in part because for political privacy votes cannot be revealed as cast, and in part because of the increasingly complex technology involved, it is subject to various vulnerabilities and compromises of design, and historically there are many incidents of voting machine compromise. As with a slot machine there is very high motivation to meddle with the numbers.

The idea of e-democracy rests totally on the reliability of software for voting.

this is a stub - needs recent issues in US and India, voting machine vendors in both, voting-over-Internet software