> glorious in its stupid inefficiency, because it spreads the trust
replyWhat is the goal? Having fancy crypto or people being confident about elections?
If spreading the trust is the goal what makes you say "inefficient". It is orders of magnitude better then any crypto system.
GP means inefficient in the sense of cost. Paper ballots add costs. Partial manual audits / hand-counts add costs. Full audits / hand-counts add a lot of cost, and in particular hand-counts require a lot of staff in order to yield results on election night.
replyThe costliest item is counting by hand, so... don't. Use ballot scanning and counting machines and then implement a timely partial manual audit to demonstrate that the BMDs and BSCDs functioned correctly.
Full hand count is a feature not a cost. The more people involved and see democracy happen and have actual agency in making it happen the better.
replyAutomating any of the process is (imho) harmful to above.
As I wrote in another comment we had to repeat local state elections because of problems in the paper process - including shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote, ballots being delivered to the wrong locations, and in some cases voters being turned away.
replyWhile I’m a proponent of the paper process let’s not pretend it immediately means you can be confident about the election
Oh, you absolutely can and it worked in your state. There were problems with the process and you had to repeat the election for people to be confident. People can understand all problems of the above.
replyWith some abstract math and computers? Any real or imaginary issues are incomprehensible to most of the voters and concerns can be easily shooed away.