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.