I tend to think the arguments in favour of the old paper system are flawed. They basically say that the paper system is easier to understand for everyone and ea

I tend to think the arguments in favour of the old paper system are flawed. They basically say that the paper system is easier to understand for everyone and easier to prove, and maybe cost more to corrupt. But that is an illusion that could very well be shattered in a few weeks, for those who stick to American politics. The advantage of the paper system is that people are familiar with it, and they think they know how it works. Much like you might think you know how accessing a website works, you actually don't know every detail in that stack. Do you really know how the light in the fibres get read? How virtual memory and TLB works? What about rendering the page in react? I can say I studied all these things and I still don't entirely know how the whole thing works, I am simply confident that certain abstractions are going to hold, so I don't worry about the nitty gritty of how semiconductors and lasers work. In paper voting land, it is the same. Everyone who has voted has seen the interface: you get a piece of paper, you put it into a box, and in the evening someone is chosen to disappoint the nation for the next few years. You imagine that in between there are competent and honest people counting the votes, reporting their subtally, and totalling the numbers they get, up a tree to someone who ends up with the whole picture, which he then dutifully reports to the nation. But what is holding this together? Essentially, just faith. There may be checks designed at various points to make sure nobody does a bad job of counting, but with enough contention this will break. The system might do just fine if one or two people forget a pile of votes, sure. But what if you have people complaining that they can't vote in the first place? What if everyone decides they need to contest the vote if their guy doesn't win? What if there are complaints about the aggregation? There could easily be a situation where everyone thinks the system is just broken and will never work again with the current system. What moving to electronic voting could give us is sacrificibility. You have a shit election, you blame the system, you make a new one. Paper voting isn't branded ("Accenture Voter System") and will remain stained by problems.