Public trust demands open-source voting systems

The system is a whole bunch of people from different parties being present when votes are collected and counted. And with paper ballots you need to do the fraud in many different polling stations.

It is possible to do small-scale fraud with paper ballots, you can never fully eliminate that option. But it is exceedingly hard to do larger scale fraud without it being extremely obvious to any observer.

Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy.

Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway.

Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately.

Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.

You can also use statistical techniques to audit results that are for the most part automatically tabulated by machine.

These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.)

Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical systems, people had to count ballots by hand. There were many fewer people voting then, and regardless, that's not really the point: they counted by hand because they had no alternative.

Electronic voting certainly brings new problems into the mix. I don't think those problems are insurmountable. The problem isn't the technology itself. It's the legal and social landscape around voting technology. Open source, with reproducible builds and a method to verify that the code running on a machine was built from a particular version of source, is a start. Verification of that software's functionality, on par with the verification done of critical software (medical devices, things that go into space, slot machines, etc.) would be another good move.

Voters can also receive paper receipts, and I'm sure we can come up with some sort of scheme to take a representative sample of the electronically-recorded votes and validate them against the paper receipts, while maintaining voter privacy.

Just use paper, count by hand, and abolish mail-in ballots and you should be fine.