> Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room? And neither do touchscreens. Paper is better if it's not done comically wrong. And even the worst pape

> Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room? And neither do touchscreens. Paper is better if it's not done comically wrong. And even the worst paper ballots have a much smaller attack surface for plain old analog rumors than the best possible electronic system. The most powerful way to undermine a democracy is not flipping some votes to one candidate in perfect secrecy, it's making all candidates/camps believe that the other did. This could destroy a democracy even without a single vote having actually been tampered with. Electronic voting, only understood by experts, is perfect soil for such rumors and no amount of open sourcing can change that. The many human counters involved in a hierarchical paper vote counting scheme are not just an unfortunate inefficiency left over from a time when machines could not count yet, they also serve as witnesses, not only for keeping their peers in check but also for dampening any unfounded rumors that might come up. They increase trust even when they are not actively speaking up against rumors, just by being there, in numbers, as passive dampening elements like the moderator rods in a fission plant.