The advantage of paper ballots is that the possible ways that the system can be rigged are technologically limited. Either ballots are forged or ballot are miscounted. Both are mitigated by having election officials physically present who validate that voter registrations are valid and that counting is being done accurately, and having those officials be made up of representatives from each participating political party.
replyThen the defense-in-depth is that paper ballots are inherently decentralized. Even if you manage to pull off a complex operation to rig ballots at a local voting location, you'd have to do the same at hundreds or thousands of other locations to affect the results of the election.
It's easier to restore the security of elections run with paper ballots because people can get involved locally. It's not possible to steal numerous paper-based elections in a row -- at some point the thieves' energy/funding runs out and security can be restored. With a digital system, if the system is changed to be vulnerable, or if it always was, then there is no way to recover.
replyI don't agree with this statement. If the system is corrupt (take for example Russia), then the voting system doesn't simply matter. Having absolute access to millions of votes, either digital or on paper, allows any dictator to decide the outcome.
replyMillions of slips of paper are very easy to burn, and print...
E-votes just make it cheaper/easier to vote in free countries. I don't think we have invented a truly dictator-proof voting system available yet.
> at some point the thieves' energy/funding runs out
replyI don’t see why that should be the case. If you can influence gov elections every couple of years that seems like a pretty big deal.
On the other hand having the voting source code public and auditable seems like a good way to build trust