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But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.

• acdha 5y ago
  The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places. Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
• tsimionescu 5y ago
  Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered. The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.