Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.
sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to misuse it is intrinsic.
[1] https://www.news.admin.ch/en/newnsb/ZLw6w1GV_UdJKDocuT0sX
It’s not a United States issue. Look how Taiwan does vote counting: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. They don’t do it this way because of anything distinctive about American politics. Being self-evidently difficult to manipulate, without requiring voters to trust an opaque system, is an intrinsic benefit for voting systems.
Electronic voting has lots of advantages. It can be end-to-end verified, it can be a great help to disadvantaged people (blind, illiterate), it can deliver results faster, it can probably be made more robust to retail-level tampering than paper ballots provided a paper audit trail it kept (as all electronic systems designed with security in mind do).
The one question mark in my mind: the current US system resisted Trump's efforts to corrupt it pretty well. I think that was because of the inertia created all the people involved in staffing the ballot stations, counting and verifying the votes. The machinations of the electoral college being highly visible put people doing the wrong thing at high risk for decades after Trump leaves the stage.
An automated electronic system could remove a lot of that human inertia. Human efficiency is not an advantage in an electoral system, it's a weakness. You want as many people involved as possible.
That's a thing pretty much everywhere. Developed countries such as Germany automatically enroll everyone eligible based on the registration data (you gotta register at the local authority after moving), but even we have a deadline if you think you should be eligible but didn't get a voting invitation to sort that out.
The big problem is, the folks who count the votes and cheat. They can invent an arbitrary number of votes to swing their guy.
Let's worry about the problems that matter.