> What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? To play devil's advocate... Paper is just a medium. With apologies to Claude Shannon, critical proper

> What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? To play devil's advocate... Paper is just a medium. With apologies to Claude Shannon, critical properties of information are best ensured through secure protocols, not by picking a particular medium. E.g., if the property you want is security, encryption is more provably secure than invisible ink. The properly encrypted message can be stored on paper, radio, magnets, or neurons, it doesn't matter. The properties we want from ballots are somewhat uncommon and therefore very unintuitive. They are still properties of information. Availability and deniability simultaneously? (So you can personally confirm, but never provably sell your vote). We could design a cryptographic protocol to meet those unique design goals. But not using paper alone, because the math would be too hard. Paper appears to guarantee availability and privacy, just as invisible ink appears to guarantee security. In practice, each often fall short. Ballot boxes disappear. Absentee ballots travel through the postal system, which is a bit like blasting one unencrypted UDP packet and hoping for the best. No individual can take their paper ballot and later confirm how it was counted. You could do these things with electrons though. It would require some fast math, like almost all useful protocols in information theory.