I think we can assume quite a long chain of people per box.

And it quickly becomes unmaintenable, "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead".

Indeed, my back of the napkin was ~1+ conspirator per ballot box, assuming many boxes per polling place.

Making a conspiracy like that work at US scale would require a small country's worth of conspirators which really, really wouldn't be able to hide from the light of day for very long.

Also, you can't just stuff a ballot box--the number of people voting has to match the count of registered voters, so if you are stuffing you have the problem of also dealing with somehow getting rid of the legitimate ballots.

> harder to hack paper at a national scale than it is to hack an electronic voting record at a national scale

To hack the U.S 2016 votes you'd only need to flip a few counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Fl.

Except we aren't talking about independent or private actors. We are talking about the Russian government. Infiltrating and manipulating nationwide votes becomes a real possibility with resources of that scale.

It would take an immense amount of reorganization of trust, but open hardware verifiable (both in person and on some kind of trustless ledger akin to a blockchain) voting systems would be more secure against such national actors, because there would be no back room to burn the paper in. If the machine is public and you can trust it, and you can trace the results nationally to insure the results were accurate, you have more security than you have now.

That's total out and out bullshit and I'm surprised anyone dared post that on here. We're intelligent people you know and the "Muh Russia" narrative is not only dead, it is also buried. It was an out and out lie that only got traction due to the media being completely partisan and focused on creating outcomes instead of doing their job which is to objectively report on current events.