What does HackerNews think of electionguard?

Have a look at the links I shared above, particularly https://verifiedvoting.org/votingequipment/ for a quick summary; it gives some analysis of different voting equipment and concerns thereof.

In particular, purely-digital systems are widely regarded to be too vulnerable to hacking to be safe. What you're describing sounds like DRE with VVPAT, which isn't considered to be a secure option, though it's better than DRE without VPAT since as you note you can in principle audit it. (However, note that most jurisdictions don't yet do RLAs to randomly audit, so right now digitizing, even with VPAT, could weaken the system.)

I think the basic idea here is -- if paper is secure and will be your fallback, and digital is insecure, you should just build your process to be optimized for paper-first, rather than digital-first. Digitizing as you suggest doesn't really gain anything over paper (except perhaps reporting provisional results faster, but you'd still need to do a risk-limiting audit to verify that your digital votes didn't get hacked so this might be a wash), but it does add more attack surfaces along the chain of custody.

Ultimately, paper is a very robust solution to the problem of making the system hard to subvert at scale; you can think of it as a sort of "proof of work", where it would be extremely difficult for, say, Russia, or the DNC / RNC to tamper with large quantities of ballots across the nation. Compare that robustness with a digital system, where IF it works you have the same properties... but around here we all know that almost all digital systems can be owned by a persistent enough adversary.

If you're willing to relax some of the requirements around refutability, there are some interesting e-voting schemes, for example you can do some cool stuff with homomorphic encryption like https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard/. But there is something to be said for having a tallying algorithm like "count the pieces of paper" that doesn't require a PhD to understand.

If you exclusively rely on technology then yeah, it's a recipe for disaster. We can't simply ignore technology because of its flaws, it can also bring some positive improvements to the democratic process if combined with multiple layers of verifications. Each of these layers should be interdependent to ensure the integrity of the process.

I found this a while ago https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard, this seems like a good step forward to improve transparency in the process and would allow everyone to confidentially verify that their vote was effectively counted.

You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately.

Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction:

https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard

As you should, when these systems are closed sourced. Would you trust an open source system, though?

https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard