Election Transparency

I often wonder why an industrial superpower like the United States has such a difficult time having a fair election while a third-world country with over a billion people, like India, can get by with purple ink on people's fingers.
Actually I wonder a lot about our elections. Every voting district has their own election board which may have a different set of rules and protocols for how elections are run. There is little consistency between these election boards.
The Supervisor of Elections is an elected member of one of the parties. How can that be? It's easy to infer that there would be bias because of that.
The Secretary of State for each state is also an elected member of one of the major political parties. They step in, just as Katherine Harris did in Florida in 2000, when there are discrepancies or a recount has to be done.
There are obvious conflicts of interest with having party-people running elections.
The goal of free elections is to have it be fair and have the process be as transparent as possible so that there can be no doubt in the minds of the voters that the integrity of the election was maintained.
To me the only way that can be done is to have a third-party come in and certify that the 'election process' is fair and stable.
Here in Florida the lottery process has to be signed off on by a major auditing firm. They determine the tests needed to make sure that each drawing is random and fair with no bias. Why can't we have the election process certified?
It actually makes life for the Supervisor of Elections easier. All they have to do is execute the process and troubleshoot the anomolies that happen during the election.
If the public doesn't trust that the elections are being carried out with the highest un-biased integrity then they lose faith in Democracy in general.
If Americans lose faith in Democracy then what are the peoples of the world that we're pushing this form of government on going to think?