Paper ballots are safe only if everything else around the election is safe. It's very easy to stuff fake ballot papers into the ballot box or take out ballots y

Paper ballots are safe only if everything else around the election is safe. It's very easy to stuff fake ballot papers into the ballot box or take out ballots you don't like by unsealing the box. If you don't like the way a constituency has voted, it's very easy to fire ballot box and burn the papers. It takes time and manpower to secure ballot boxes for a long time required for manual counting and to secure and transport ballot papers before that. You need to have multiple supervisors witnessing counting of each vote to prevent the counter from manipulating the count which takes time and slows down counting. All this and more has happened in the history of paper ballot elections in India - which is partly why India moved to electronic voting which is a lot harder to tamper with. Paper ballot works only in a utopian world where you assume simple thuggery doesn't happen