this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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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