First a word about the need to rely on such “indirect” methods of election verification. It is not something that has been thought about or talked about much, but the vote counting process in the United States is designed for concealment. Most absurdly, the code that counts or miscounts votes has been ruled a corporate trade secret that cannot be divulged or examined under any circumstances.
Nor does the concealment stop with the code. All the “hard” evidence—memory cards, programming code, server logs, and actual cast ballots—is strictly off-limits to the public and, in most cases, to election administrators as well.