this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Every system can be subverted. Ballot boxes or stacks of votes stuff or lost... The integrity is in the checks and balances, verifiable oversight.
Electronic voting can be subverted at scale without a paper trail leading to you. People are going to notice you trying to hide the big ballot boxes up your t-shirt.
My country doesn't have electronic voting. Are the machines networked? One would hope not.
And with voting machines there is no verifiable oversight.
You just kind of have to trust that the software that is running on the voting machine is actually correctly tallying your vote, and not doing shenanigans behind the scene. Even if the code is open source, and everyone knew how to read code, you cannot reasonably guarantee that that is the software that is running inside the black box that is a voting machine.
With paper voting you can observe the entire process from start to finish. There are no black boxes which just spit out an answer that you simply have to trust.
The machine can print a human and machine readable copy. Then feed that into another machine after verifying and you have two independent digital counts that can verify each other. You also have the paper that can be manually counted if you need to be extra sure.
This is what we had for a few years. Now the first step is replaced by manual bubbling. Still have the scan for the instant digital count though.
And now you have moved the problem. Now you need to verify that the verification machine is also running the software you want and has also not been compromised. And you need to do this for every single voting machine in use, all of them.
With trillions of dollars riding on the result of an election, the motive for a group/nation to interfere is immense. Attacks against digital systems scale incredibly well, changing a handful of votes is barely different from changing all of them. This is not the case with physical votes, the more votes you want to change the more people you have to involve, and the likelihood you are caught goes up.
On your point about printing off a human readable copy that can be verified manually, you have now invented the worlds most expensive pencil. You'll always want to verify the manual copy, so why bother with the computer one?
A fun fact about why pencils are used in voting in the UK is due to paranoia about pens being replaced with ones containing vanishing ink. There is no evidence this exists or has ever been done, but it demonstrates the levels some countries work at to ensure that all votes are accurately counted, and probably so.
This way the state can count the votes quickly and if there are any audits they have a physical analog to compare. Honestly if the state just randomly audits 1 county per election to check for issues they will catch anything weird going on and save a tremendous amount of time and money.
If the audit discovers something weird they can then count up all the paper ballots and fix the software.
Additionally in 2024 the UK had 28,809,340 votes cast. The US had 158,427,986 votes cast.
Why does the state need to count votes quickly? Votes should be counted accurately, not quickly.
Total number of votes cast doesn't really change anything, because total number of counters and witnesses can also be increased relatively. The USA has a 5 times larger population than the UK but that doesn't mean it takes 5 times longer to count.
And again, accuracy is more important than speed.
You can have both