> It's far easier to swing an election by hacking a few voting machines than to forge thousands of ballots. Millions of ballots. You can go further. Australia

> It's far easier to swing an election by hacking a few voting machines than to forge thousands of ballots. Millions of ballots. You can go further. Australia has independent electoral commissions which run the elections. Voting is compulsory and preferential. The entire process is overseen by scrutineers -- individuals appointed by candidates -- so there are always multiple mutually-suspicious observers in the room. Many of the most subversible steps in the voting process, for example replacing a ballot box that is full, have to be cross-signed by an electoral official and at least two scrutineers appointed by different candidates. A hand count is performed three times, again under the supervision of scrutineers. If there is a arithmetical doubt about the outcome of the election, it can be voided and is re-run from scratch. This has actually happened once when several ballot boxes for the Western Australian senators were lost during a federal election. It was very unlikely, but possible, that those votes could have changed the outcome of the final senate position. The High Court voided the entire Senate election and it was redone. Elections must be trustworthy. Cumbersome, people-intensive systems are paradoxically better at this. The odds that a malicious attacker could replace millions of hand-written ballots, subvert hundreds of independent professionals, subvert thousands of independent volunteers, subvert thousands of mutually-hostile scrutineers and also fool thousands of journalists is low. I would say substantially lower than the odds for being able to subvert a single programmer or sysadmin.