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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

paper & pen has tremendous value as a recording mechanism. Although it's slower at counting and indexing, it is far better at reproducibility and durability:

* records last > 500 years with no electricity . corruption is obvious at first glance. ( bad records don't appear to be good).

* counting is easily distributed by number of workers

* readily visually inspected with no special tools . ideal for auditing

* records stay in order at rest.

* easy to detect & protect against tampering

* easy to train new users . CRUD tooling costs pennies per operator

* cheaper to scale writes & reads

TCO and risk-assessment for paper records exceeds digital on nearly every measure.

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My state uses a system that I think is the best of most worlds. You check in at one table, they give you a "receipt" that you give to another table who trades that for a little card. The card isn't linked to you at all and it gives you access to a voting machine. You enter your choices into the machine, which prints out a paper ballot that you can review and verify before putting it into the box as you leave. So, your vote is recorded by the voting machine for quick tallying, but your vote is also recorded on paper that is human and machine readable for verifiable re-counts if needed.

It’s a great idea , though the counting machine becomes a threat vector .

Counting votes isn’t really that expensive . Certainly not compared to purchasing , maintaining and securing counting machine hardware

I get that we all get paid to digitize things , so paper seems antiquated , but for many applications it’s the best solution

Yeah, and this solution results in paper ballots. You get three different ways to count them.

the opportunity to recount is not itself an adequate protection for an online counting machine. in my county for example, recounts are only triggered for close elections. they do zero auditing for normal wins.

The system needs to be secure in the primary case, not only in the audit case.

Now if you're saying the counting machine is offline, so that it's verified during the normal voting process, that would be more acceptable.

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