One of the problems in Argentina's elections is that volunteers of political parties steal the ballots of smaller parties from the voting room, and since these small parties don't have the man power or monetary resources to restock the ballots, they lose votes. A better solution would be single paper ballot, but the ruling parties don't want this because they are who benefit for the current system.

That said, this system prevents chain voting (a mechanism to make sure the votes that parties buy from low-income people are not changed).

This: http://www.laizquierdadiario.com/IMG/arton15789.jpg vs this: http://ondabaires.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Voto-ele...

This is first and foremost a PR stunt by the BA City's goverment to push a goverment "innovation" bullet point.

I guess it would be easier to automate the counting. Still seems an odd solution though.

And even that's not happening.

The machine also prints the vote on the ballot, and because of the known bugs in the system people are still counting them by hand.

I know three people who do vote counting every year. They all agree that the voting went very smoothly, with less crowding than usual, and the counting took a third of the time it usually does. This is unrelated to the security issues, but to them, the benefit was very clear

I don't get it. How are we unable to make a reliable mechanism to increment numbers and then print the result at the end?!

A known bug is that the counting machines doesn't validate the number of votes per ballot, so you can cast multiple votes by rewriting the RFID chip with a NFC enabled phone.

And even if they address that particular bug, because of the inherent nature of the political process, parties' representatives will always want to count the ballots by hand to prevent fraud.

EDIT: As of this moment there is no way an argentine political party would accept black-boxing an election.