[bkummel]

I live in The Netherlands. We are a reasonable modern country, where a lot of things are automated, even in governmental organizations. However, voting is still done on paper ballots. And those paper ballots are then counted manually. This has huge benefits. There always is a paper trail. It’s hard to manipulate votes without getting caught. If there’s any doubt about a certain district’s results, the votes can be recounted. This happens regularly.

Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?

[makeitdouble]

You should acknowledge the tradeoff: physical presence is the condition.

It might not happen much in the Netherlands, but for instance making it so fewer people reach voting stations is a classic move. That's one of the failure mode avoided by the other means.

Voting ballots straight getting lost/destroyed is another failure mode, and yes it happens more than we want it to.

The sheer time to get the vote counted is also an issue, and we've seen voter sentiment shifting while the vote is still ongoing, with the media reporting directly influencing the outcome.

It could still be the saner tradeoff in the end, but it's misleading to present it as some ideal or inherently reliable solution.