If we presume that the promoters of the idea are intelligent and understand the consequences, then why is it not reasonable to think that the ability to affect elections or otherwise weaken the electoral system is the gain they seek?

I feel that misunderstanding and ignorance is more to blame than malice.

Many programmers know about the "beauty" of encryption and secure voting algorithms. They know that open source works, and it's really tempting to try and think up a system that is "perfect" and can't be gamed by anyone.

But this is an instance where messier and less "perfect" is better, because the absolute worst case scenario of being able to actually change the election is so much harder with paper, and anything less than that worst case scenario doesn't change anything (and still has all of the risks and downsides).

I personally am eager to replace paper ballots with electronic in a vastly different voting system. But it would have to be a cryptographically sound electronic voting system that runs as open source on the users machines and is publicly verifiable.

The reason I want this is because it allows much more fine-grained voting. My ideal democracy is a direct democracy where every voter can, if he/she chooses, to vote on arbitrary issues, but _delegate_ their vote to someone else by default. As an example: "I politically align with Bernie Sanders, so I want by default my vote to delegate to whatever he's voting for, but for issue X I vote Y."

In an ideal world you could even delegate votes based on "tags", e.g. for Internal Affairs you choose X, and Economy Y, etc. But that seems fairly easy to manipulate by whoever is assigning the tags to issues.

There are a lot of unresolved issues around the notion of direct democracy. Referenda prove this point — e.g., the Brexit referendum and the EU-Ukraine association pact referendum in the Netherlands. In both cases media and pressure groups hijacked the process of forming an objective informed opinion, and in the Dutch case most people didn't even fully grasp what they were voting for — they just voted against out of discontent.

I am sure that there are ways to improve citizen participation in the democratic system, but directly voting on issues is not going to give us the sensible behaviour you might hope for. Representational democracy exists in part to prevent minorities from abuse by any majority — with direct democracy you eliminate that protection.

I am aware of the issues of direct democracy, but my hope is that the "defer by default" prevents most of the issues. On top of that there'd have to be education that makes people wary of others that try to convince them to specifically vote for issues that they didn't have a strong opinion on before.

Electronic voting makes superior voting systems like condorcet methods possible. Paper ballots are only really best at first past the post, which is by far the worst system of voting.

germany has no first past the post election system and elections here work perfectly fine using paper ballots. On a regional level, elections can actually get quite complicated with options to strike candidates and add multiple votes to a candidate.

It's certainly more work to count those votes, but on the other hand, everybody is entitled to go check the vote count and everybody can do so with no technical knowledge needed. Any system that requires the observer to be firm in a given piece of technology is not a superior system since it removes peoples ability to exert their right to check the public vote.

I was wrong, you can implement some alternative vote systems with paper ballots (and more work for the vote counters.) I don't like those systems personally, as I mentioned in the above comment. I don't think it would be possible to implement a system I do like, like condorcet voting, without mechanically counting votes.

Mechanical counting is not the same as electronic voting.

Equally mysteriously in the definition games, optical scanned paper ballots are never considered the same as electronic voting, although its possibly the only unhackable cheap system out there, and its just as fast, if not faster.

Also frankly more people are familiar with the UI of "#2 pencil and piece of paper" than any electronic UI I can think of or imagine, which is somewhat damning for cultural reasons on this site resulting in it being double plus ungood badthink to imply anything could be superior to contemporary trends in web and phone app UIs.

I don't think OCR is reliable or trustable enough for election software. Even the best humans and machine OCRs mistake some percent of written numbers.

I was curious if we were running into a millennial vs old timer situation, I googled to verify, and the ballots I'm talking about and the OCR-ish technology used is exactly the same as ACT and SAT tests still in use. Although I read that for many years they have been planning to move online "soon" as you'd expect.

"Fill in the correct bubble" was very new technology when I was a young adult, apparently its still in use.

One handy thing about the ballot eater machine, as a voter, is I feed it a valid ballot and it emits a happy cartoonish beep song while eating and storing my ballot for later hand recounting, and feed it an invalid or questionable ballot and it immediately kicks it back at you with musical accompaniment indicating R2D2 is clearly not amused. The OCR contrast settings can be messed with such that anything even slightly questionable (erasures, etc) will simply not be accepted. The paper ballots being cheap and the technology being easy to understand, the poll workers simply give the voter a new ballot.

I was thinking of ranked ballots, where you write a number based on the rank you give a candidate. If you just want to fill in bubbles that's much more reliable. But creates more complex ballots.

My ideal system would have a voting machine that handles the complexity and fills in the bubbles for you. Then prints it out and let's you inspect it, and turn it in like a normal ballot.

Nonsense. There are plenty of fairer voting methods that can, and do, use paper ballots. STV, Additional Member systems, Party List systems. These are in use throughout the world for national elections.

All of those would require changing the constitution and the structure of congress (basically impossible), and wouldn't work on things like presidential elections to begin with.

I also have other issues with them. Like runoff voting systems drop a moderate candidate that most people would prefer in a 1 on 1 election, but isn't listed as enough people's second vote. Resulting in more extreme, less liked, candidates getting elected. It's better than FPTP, but not by much.

> they can't be hacked

Not so sure, the paper ballot system may been hacked in 2000 US election. The other criminal activities of the Bush family make it more suspect, IMO.