Voting machines without a paper trail have been deemed unreliable, and still should be deemed unreliable. These machines are used to generate an authoritative paper ballot, which is exactly what critics have demanded.

A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.

I don't see the point of a voting machine with a paper trail. You get preliminary statistics a bit faster and you get people used to the idea of voting machines.

You also get final results much faster in most cases.

Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.

This is called a risk-limiting audit.

If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.

In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.

If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.

Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.

Still, i fell that machines make it needlessly complex. Most democracies do fine without that. Getting a fast result seems like the least important aspect of voting for representatives.

If someone is going to manipulate the results, they now have to change both the paper results and the electronic results instead of just one or the other.

Then I suppose it's a good thing you aren't making decisions about voting machines!

Instead of thinking of them as "voting machines with a paper trail," think of them as "reliable, trustworthy paper ballots that are made clean and uniform using a machine."

The point is that the output is a paper ballot which can be (and often is) hand-counted for auditing and verification purposes. Paper ballots rule.

Maybe you misunderstood me. I meant that paper votes are superior so why bother complicating the process with machines. It gives reasons to not trust or understand the process. Most democracies work fine without voting machines.

In 2000, Florida gave us just one of many examples of how paper ballots alone are not always reliable. As I said in my previous comment, the machines are used to provide clean, uniform ballots. They also would speed up counts considerably if not for people deliberately sowing distrust of the machines.

The paper emulates a blockchain.

They are as secure as they were before. But the lies are still lies.