Yep, you can recount fake paper votes, but how you will distinguish fake votes from real ones? Remember, votes are anonymous, so you cannot track vote back to live being to ask. And even if you will be able to do so, live being can lie you about his vote, to protect himself, or just to not look dumb in eyes of others.

>>> ... but how you will distinguish fake votes from real ones?

Easy. Serial numbers. Like any other anonymous system (paper money, raffle tickets etc) you assign a number to every valid ballot. Should the same number appear twice, or not appear, then you know something fishy is happening. Any extra fake ballots should be discovered, so long as the originals are not removed from the systems. Throw the numbers around randomly and creating undetectable fakes become very difficult.

The order has to be random or you can trace votes to individuals if you keep the order in which they voted.

In some voting systems (eg, the UK's), this is a feature, not a bug. Ballot serials are recorded against electoral register entries, and the courts have de-anonymized ballots in a few cases.

This is a very serious bug, even if courts want to exploit it.

Most systems seem to have two lines so it's not clear the order people voted in. Excluding hidden cameras which also work with voting machines.

> Yep, you can recount fake paper votes, but how you will distinguish fake votes from real ones?

You already have a log of who showed up to vote. Compare the number of shows S with the number of ballots V which must be <= S due to poorly marked/unreadable ballots. Simple.

Edit: and this all statistically correlates with exit polls. It's very, very hard to fake all three of these in order to rig an election.

So yes, you have log, you have votes. How to distinguish real votes from fake ones? State can start election again from scratch, when it will find a problem, but people will vote very differently at this next election, because whole story will affect their minds and votes. Brave fakers can raise stakes and win.

It's not necessary for a subsequent vote to have the same outcome as the first. The issue is whether the election is secure and people have trust in the system.

Indeed, here is a recent example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_elec...

So first goal of fakers is to ruin that. It even written as one of main goals in Russian trolls goal books. Find a copy of such book and read it: you will learn a lot.

Once there's no longer trust in the system, you're right, secure voting is no longer a problem.

Which is why it's important to fix this earlier rather than later.

If it's your goal to cast more FUD on the issue, that's your choice. I can't even ask to you be honest about it because that wouldn't be congruent with spreading FUD.

Just trust your leaders and FUD will not work.

Explain "fake paper votes". I'm not sure that this is a real problem with normal auditing -- record all voters that come into a precinct, what time they appear, and compare to the number of received ballots. Comparing signatures of voters to the file signature is common for absentee voting. It's just far harder and riskier to mess around with compromising paper ballots than a mistake (or "mistake") in a line of code.

You cannot force voters to come in and confirm that they sold their votes for exchange of money. They will lie. You must catch fakers, which is tricky when they have chance to win election and punish you, like Stalin did.