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Gotta go back to the old tried and true Butterfly Ballot system. That never fails.
Nothing in the election machinery prevents a candidate from claiming fraud.
Certainly, nothing about pen and paper ballots prevents disreputable agents from stuffing ballot boxes or just refusing to count opposition votes entirely.
But it's much less plausible when you have more secure voting systems.
Two great videos by Tom Scott. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
This is easily solved by never having any portion of the vote counting and transport happen alone. And representatives from all parties all invigilate so there's no funny business.
Not to brag, but there's almost never any doubt in our elections, and rarely anyone claiming fraud.
It's not perfect, but sorry, Australian elections are better than any country using electronic voting.
You simply cannot verify electronic voting in the same way you can physical writing, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying or doesn't understand.
No lay voter has any idea of what constituents "secure" in a material sense.
All you have are people insisting "my system is safe, your system is not". And this thread is a perfect illustration.
Hand marked paper ballots are notoriously prone to failure. Nothing about them is materially more secure than a printed ballot. And yet...
It isn't easily solved, as the number of venues and volume of votes leave ample opportunities for shenanigans (or, at least, alleged shenanigans).
The Ohio Recount in 2004 is a classic example.
There is something inherantly more secure about physical ballots. They exist in the physical world and need to be physically counted, and can't be just erased by the flip of a bit.
I can fully wipe a harddrive fairly trivially, I can't fully erase a pencil mark without some serious chemicals, an iron and probably a bunch else.
First of all, the USA in general has terrible voting practices. Second you're right, no system can ever fully defend against people making shit up and getting voters to distrust an election, however:
An average person can fully comprehend how a paper voting system is kept secure. An average person cannot do the same for electronic voting because inherantly it gets into software and hardware security.
I really encourage you to watch those videos I sent, Tom Scott lays out the arguments very well.
There isn't. They can be easily misread and miscounted, they can be misfiled, hidden, lost, and destroyed. They are a bitch to transport securely. They can vary in format and interpretation. They're comically easy to spoil.
No they can't.
Again, jump back to Bush v Gore. Or go all the way back to Nixon v Kennedy or Tammeny Hall New York. Hell, consider the elections in Iraq and Vietnam and Korea after the various US occupations, and the comically one-sided election results. Or elections in the old Soviet Bloc, which Americans routinely dismissed as fraudulent. Or the most recent elections in Latin America that remain openly disputed.
Very easy to point to historical moments where the paper ballot systems were distrusted. That's pretty much the whole history of their use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
You mean the classic example of once again fucking around with something not just pencil and paper, in a country with a history of laughably bad voting systems?
You are also just lumping in bad election procedure and declaring electronic voting better.
I'm not saying paper elections are secure just by the virtue that they're on paper, and you framing it that way is pretty dishonest. I'm saying that the most secure electronic election can never be as secure as the most secure paper election.
You've just ignored all I've said about invilators from all parties, adequate supervision of all ballots at all times. Do errors happen? Sure, but in far, far smaller fraction that what you could achieve by compromising election machines.
The fact that machines are un-networked is a laughable defence. Ever heard of Stuxnet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
This is ABSOLUTELY within the capabilities of state actors. Like not just theoretically. It's already happened in multiple cases.
I'm sorry, but everyone could learn a thing or two from the Australian system. We certainly don't have a fair democracy because we live under capitalism, and the wealthy will always use their influence to get their way, but at least our election procedures are probably one of the best, if not the best in the world.
If you want to just pretend like electronic voting is secure, then have fun I guess. But you're literally just sticking your fingers in your ears.
Pencil-marked central-count optical scan ballots had a 5.7% undercount rate in Florida counties that adopted the technique.
You can find out more here: https://www.usccr.gov/files/historical/2001/01-021.pdf
These were not unique to Florida, by any moans.
Just from the table of contents, this was an absolutely cluster fuck of a terribly run election. I beg you please stop misrepresenting the argument.
The best paper elections possible are more secure than the best electronic elections possible.
You keep describing terribly run paper elections and pretending it's an argument in your favour.
If you refuse to address this point I'm kinda done with this.
"Paper ballots are more secure!"
"Obviously, the textbook case that exposes all the problems with manually managing and tallying physical ballots is beside the point"
Okay, sure.
Electronically input printed ballots are the best method of tabulating an election result we have formulated to date.
There is absolutely no benefit to using pencils on paper. None. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss.
Your fetish for pencils doesn't change with the election season. It just becomes blindingly apparent when election is fumbled badly enough to necessitate a deep dive into what went wrong.