A Truly Fancy Bear: Did Trump Win Because Russia Hacked the Election?

I don't understand why any machine has to be involved in the public voting part.

I've worked as a volunteer in elections here. All paper, no electronics or even mechanical systems involved. It's relatively hard to compromise such a process, you would need to corrupt all the volunteers at one voting place, with different party backgrounds etc., and even then it would only affect a tiny portion of votes and probably wouldn't make a big difference.

When the count is done, you see the paper stacks for each party.

The per-district counts from the central counting places are published, so you can easily see if something is wrong compared to what you saw at the voting place.

Also from it's trivial to verify that the totals match on the higher levels, it's just addition. So from that point on, it doesn't matter if they use computers or not.

Even the fact that this is a serious possibility is an indictment of the machinery of US elections it seems to me. A free and fair democracy pretty much depends on the trustworthiness of it’s electoral process.