Why use voting machines at all? Just stick to pen and paper.
Simple folk physics gives everyone an understanding of the security of ballot boxes. There's thousands of ballot boxes, each in a different physically-secured location, with various personnel keeping track of them, many of them citizen volunteers and workers, as well as partisan observers. Everyone intuitively understands the security, as well as security flaws, of this system.
All of that is lost with electronic voting. Even with complete confidence/faith in the system, it simply becomes a black box. Press button and the vote total is spit out. Only a few experts understand the system in a way that they could explain how that total was arrived at and why you should have confidence in it. And even fewer would be able to actually verify that the black box does what it says it does and that you should by confident in it. Otherwise it's just a box that spits out a number. And computers make up numbers all the time.
Ostensibly it was done to support disabled (blind) folks to vote without anyone else seeing their ballot, but has introduced a massive potential for fraud (lack of paper ballots originally) and distrust (can you verify your vote?) in the process. MAGA just took that distrust and weaponized it.
[1] https://www.eac.gov/about_the_eac/help_america_vote_act.aspx
As long as they aren't stuffing more ballots or modifying existing ones it should be easy to do a recount at any time.
A tiny horror story from the last Norwegian election was when some results were delayed due to problems with a scanner. The news story about that machine mentioned that the machine was connected to the internet (shudder), and ran Win XP (facepalm).
The internet should only be used for reporting preliminary numbers, and the counting machines should not be talking directly to the net at all.
If you're blind or otherwise need assistance marking your form, you can bring along a person of your choosing or you can ask for two officials to help you out.
If you need accessibility and online voting, you're hosed: there's a system and it sucks.
Overall, there's room for improvement but it's better than all of the electronic-first systems.
Very handy, ballots are tied to each machine for random validation and etc.
I like that system, best of both worlds.
There is no reason for an American citizen today to trust the security of pen and paper elections. There never was, but now we have digital tooling.
When one side is determined to scrutinize a large-scale process until it falls apart the process will inevitably breakdown.
- They can provide different accessibility assistance than pen and paper, allowing people to vote on their own. Multi-language support should be easy.
- They can provide UI improvements over paper. Consider situations where the voter needs to select up to 3 candidates out of a list of 12. Or a long ballot with lots of distinct questions.
- Hopefully less lead time for updates to the ballot if someone drops out of the race, is replaced, etc.
The past few times I've voted (Canada) it's been pencil on paper, stuck into a machine that confirmed it could read the ballot, then I left. When it's been a longer ballot for municipal election it's actually felt like a bit of a test. We are voting for: city councillor, mayor, regional representatives, multiple school board trustees from one of two different school boards (but not both).
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electi...
IMO, for the same reason people are concerned about them...
France handles elections via paper and pen and has everything counted within 24 hrs. Somehow the U.S. had trouble even doing it in a week last election.