3 ms·

Are there places that don't do paper voting in the US? Ballots are still paper everywhere I've voted (mail in ballots, electronic ballots with printouts, fillin

by tdb7893 9mo ago

Are there places that don't do paper voting in the US? Ballots are still paper everywhere I've voted (mail in ballots, electronic ballots with printouts, filling in bubbles, etc. It's always been paper). Also, even with paper ballots hand counted people aren't suddenly going to trust elections, at least not some people I know. I had someone say that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the last election. That obviously didn't happen and there's already controls to stop that from happening but that didn't stop them from believing it. It's one of the issues with the conspiratorial thinking, it's durable even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

nonethewiser 9mo ago
Isn't it effectively computers everywhere? Sure, you may write on a piece of paper but there is a computer scanning and reporting it. I dont see a practical difference between that and submitting a form directly on a computer.
- tdb7893 9mo ago
  With paper ballots you can do hand recounts physically with the paper and it's much harder to change values than digitally (obviously), which is a huge difference. You could switch to hand counting by default for everything but the conspiracy theories are really durable for process changes like that so my experience is it won't make a difference. To expand on that a bit: I've only found their preferred candidate winning to be a long term convincing argument to them (and even then they still will be suspicious). The scenarios I've heard aren't even possible in the current system but they don't trust the election system as a whole so there's no control they would be satisfied with. Even if they personally counted the paper ballots themselves they would just say the ballots were switched out before they got them. Obviously not everyone who doesn't trust elections is like this but I know a lot of people like this.

by tdb7893 9mo ago

nonethewiser 9mo ago

Isn't it effectively computers everywhere? Sure, you may write on a piece of paper but there is a computer scanning and reporting it. I dont see a practical difference between that and submitting a form directly on a computer.

tdb7893 9mo ago
With paper ballots you can do hand recounts physically with the paper and it's much harder to change values than digitally (obviously), which is a huge difference. You could switch to hand counting by default for everything but the conspiracy theories are really durable for process changes like that so my experience is it won't make a difference. To expand on that a bit: I've only found their preferred candidate winning to be a long term convincing argument to them (and even then they still will be suspicious). The scenarios I've heard aren't even possible in the current system but they don't trust the election system as a whole so there's no control they would be satisfied with. Even if they personally counted the paper ballots themselves they would just say the ballots were switched out before they got them. Obviously not everyone who doesn't trust elections is like this but I know a lot of people like this.