No, it would not require a large conspiracy to pull off. With electronic voting, a single highly skilled engineer could rig an election without needing any accomplices at all. That is why it's terrifying.
I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show.
What is simply required is a publicly available audit of elections, where any citizen can verify for themselves the outcome of their local results.
Yes, you need some minimum of civil society infrastructure for paper ballots to be categorically more secure than electronic ballots.
But the article is about the US. In the US, paper is simply safer.
It's not just the paper system it's that the paper system can be monitored by representatives of each party, there's no good way to do that with an electronic system that doesn't at least create a separate paper record of the vote that's counted separately.
Yeah, well, don't drive into trees then.
Well-designed, verifiable, auditable paper ballot systems already exist in the US. In many states, the paper-based ballot process is completely safe and reliable. For those states that struggle, the correct solution is to look to the states that don't struggle, and imitate them.
If corruption is widespread at all levels of society no system will work.
> I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show.
And you know that this happens because you need a shit show to mess election at that level. With electronic voting, you will not even notice.
Paper voting is inefficient and is what it makes it hard to break. You need a lot of manpower to alter an election. If you can alter the election result with manpower, the system that you use does not matter anymore.