Same for machines, they’ll have to trust that some people did their job and checked these machines.
Not saying this will happen any time soon though ;)
If, in turn, elections are organised as distributed, local, and highly public countings, that get aggregated up to the final tally, citizens stay in control of their votes. Poll workers in a county may not count the votes of another county themselves, but they know there will be other volunteers all over the country doing so. It is extremely hard to manipulate a large-scale movement of politically inclined volunteers, and they can rely on that.
We cannot hand control over the vote to the government we possibly want to vote out. By reducing the massively distributed trust to a handful of computer wizards, we remove transparency from voting, turning it into a sham event that can be orchestrated by those in power to their liking.
Plenty of incentives and options even with paper ballots, as many dictators have shown.
> distributed, local, and highly public countings
Why wouldn’t this be possible with machines?
> We cannot hand control over the vote to the government
If you trust the people checking the machines have not been manipulated, this is not at all what would be happening.
Is that so? If anything, they ignore the ballots or fake the numbers—see Venezuela. That is another problem entirely.
> Why wouldn’t this be possible with machines?
With paper ballot countings, even the most plain citizen, can witness the counting and ensure themselves nothing shady is going on: Watching as people create heaps from ballots with a checkmark in the same box, then call out the numbers is not beatable in terms of accessibility.
With machines, complexity is orders of magnitude higher: Watching the computer is pointless. You don't get to see how it adds up votes, you have to trust its software is working as advertised. There is just no way to verify no component of the stack has been manipulated.
> If you trust the people checking the machines have not been manipulated, this is not at all what would be happening.
But that is the point! Why would you ever do that? What power does that grant to these people? How dangerous would it be to be such a person? Who even would these non-government election experts be? Why limit the number of people able to verify an election is going on truthfully to a small amount of technically literate experts, when we have a perfectly working democratic system in place?
Tell me this; how can you check the machines have not been manipulated with a 100 percent certainty? How do you verify the screen displays what it is supposed to, the software has no backdoors, the hardware has no backdoors, there are no parts swapped out, there are no second-order effects of transistors flipping bits if the ambient temperature reaches a certain point, the cables have not been messed with, the data it sends is not intercepted or altered, the packages won't be dropped, or arrive in duplicates, or any of the other myriad of possible failure conditions? An election is an extremely rewarding target for both internal and foreign/rival state actors. Just think of Stuxnet if you think this is paranoid, and that was 2010! How would you ensure that even the most sophisticated attackers won’t come up with an exploit?
You cannot. You cannot do this reliably for every machine involved in the election; the combined knowledge and experience involved in each of these questions far exceeds even most IT professionals. So you immediately remove the ability to witness the election from almost every citizen, by making the process infinitely more complex and harder to understand, for no reason at all. I know there are lots of interesting problems to solve here, but democracy is not the right place for complex solutions to interesting problems.
There is virtually no compelling reason to drop a working process in favour of machines here.
Edit: and one more thing with elections is that you cannot just try again if something seems suspicious. You’ve completely shattered trust at that point, and the victor would rightfully claim the election had been stolen from them. Again: Democracy is no place for technological solutions.
Elections with paper ballots are somewhat straightforward in that regard. Any party member that doesn't trust the process can literally apply to check part of it and be able to see for themselves that there is nothing fishy going on in the part they checked. And they can do that with nearly no prior expertise. If they don't get to check it for themselves they can trust that enough people like them are envolved in the process that someone would collect evidence of wrongdoing if it happened. And these people are normal people and many, so bribing them doesn't make sense. Adversaries that want to make that election untrustworthy would have to insert so many people at so many steps and at such number, an attack against it quickly becomes impractical.
Not with a computer system, I am not even sure if I would trust a system that I myself setup and software that I myself had written if used in a high stakes election. But the few experts that are able to verify the process and have the computer knowledge to do so without naive optimism now are high stakes targets and each party now needs to have one at each polling station at some point after which the machines (air gapped?) need to be completely isolated unless you want that verification to become meaningless. The voter now needs to trust the expert and for a hint about how well that works I want to point you to the Covid pandemic.
So digital voting is a non-trivial problem to solve, especially for high stakes, anonymous, but transparent elections. And we computer people can't just hand-wave the doubts away, you need to address each attack vector a major nation state attacker could/would exploit. And even if we did that the result would be a system that nobody without special education could understand.
Sure, paper ballots are slow and the process lengthy and labour intensive. But the results are surprisingly stable and trustworthy even in many places where one would expect corruption and manipulation.
It sounds like you are not familiar with the concept of verifiability or more precisely E2E-V for evoting systems that can be attained. The goal is to never trust the software that is running the machines or officials and thoose are kept accountable with a public cryptographic evidence produced along with final tally. They still are trusted with not sabotaging the process and assuming that one or few parties are not corrupt to ensure vote anonimity, but never with integrity.