Well, you need an escalation path when chain of custody is broken. It's great to say you depend on chain of custody, but how do you handle the violations of it?

Well, you need an escalation path when chain of custody is broken. It's great to say you depend on chain of custody, but how do you handle the violations of it? Mistakes happen. But so do attacks. It's probably not reasonable to cancel the whole election based on some missing chain of custody documents, and the (mostly volunteer) election workers can legitimately claim human error. But isn't that an ideal environment for an attacker to commit plausibly deniable ballot fraud? For example: Swap a pile of mail-in ballots (recently separated from their envelopes) with an equally sized pile of pre-filled malicious ballots. Or, take a bag of ballots from rejected envelopes, mix them with uncounted ballots from accepted envelopes, and then replace some of them with prefilled ballots. Or commit any other uncorrectable chain of custody violation that allows you to introduce new ballots into the count, but that could also feasibly be an accident. When challenged, don't admit to introducing additional ballots, but openly admit to the tainted chain of custody, and claim it was a mistake. It's unlikely you'll face any real consequence, and you can accuse your opponents of being election deniers. Yet you had the chance to intentionally introduce phantom ballots into the counting process while increasing the expected error margin of any potential audit. Note that you can still process every legitimate ballot, and confirm to any voter that you processed their ballot. And maybe you can even confirm to any non-voter that you did not process their pre-mailed ballot. But you cannot confirm that you processed only legitimate ballots. In other words: one plausibly inconsequential broken chain of custody is sufficient opportunity to introduce new ballots unassociated with any real voters.