> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.
(Aside: it’s actually pencil and paper since pencils are more reliable. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm#pencils)
In some ways, but the ability to erase a pencil mark is a huge issue with ballots.
IMHO, pens with tamper resistant ink, plus a process for making an exchange for a new ballot paper in case of error, is a much better choice.
The security is in how ballots are treated, how they are monitored and handled, not how they are marked. It's never a problem that they are in pencil. Ever.
If someone has an opportunity to monkey with the ballots? The system has already failed.
As I said in another post, if you think you found a hole, it's because you didn't research what's actuallly happening.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/25/evan-low-up-by-one-vo...
> Some of those challenged ballots in San Mateo County had illegible or no postmark dates and Assistant Chief Elections Officer Jim Irizarry said they were waiting on information from the U.S. Postal Service
With small margins, an election could come down to how people read a smudged postmark. It might not be an issue, but you won't know who "really" won, either. It depends how you count it.
The ballots were fragile, and this is an example of not using pen and paper.
You're actually proving my point here. Keep it simple! Pen and paper is perfectly fine, and all problems with how to handle the marking has been resolved for centuries.
It's change that is the problem here, and change for no sensible reason.
There's nothing to fix, to improve, to resolve with paper ballots. Nothing, except the pocket books of companies pushing ridiculous solutions.
You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.