[db1234]

Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization involved at various levels during distribution making it difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and improve it.

[recursivecaveat]

I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.

[unethical_ban]

Scalable? Not for same-day. I'd be fine waiting a few days if needed, though. Heck, early voting means I wait for weeks now.

Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers.

I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count.

This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.

[crooked-v]

In the case of India, keep in mind that the country still has a significant illiteracy rate (about 20% as of 2018) and plenty of people who have literally never used a paper form in their lives. One of the key design goals of the machines is to try and reduce the education needed as much as possible while still keeping things more private and efficient than voice votes.

[cafard]

I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of congress, state senator, three state representatives, a county councilmember or two, a member of the board of education etc.

[samarthr1]

Scale is a bit of an issue.

We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours.

Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.

One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not).

At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.

[jfengel]

Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're under 24 years old.

The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.

That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.