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Comment by motardo | Hacker News Reader

Yes. With paper ballots, cheating is at least detectable because there is literally a paper trail. With touch screens, maybe the results are correct, maybe the machine miscounted. There is no way to really know.

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The machine I used in early voting also had a paper trail - when you submitted the votes, it printed them as a secondary record. It was moving too fast for me to read all the votes as the paper went by, but the ones I caught were correct. So there is a literal paper trail there.

There are digital records more than just a tally. Sure, maybe it's possible (with physical access) to destroyed or altered them, but the same holds for paper.

It's much harder to undetectably destroy or alter large numbers of paper records than it is to do the same to digital records.

It's also sometimes possible to do this to digital records without ever being physically present in their vicinity. Once again, this is much harder with paper.

It's very easy to forge paper records, though. I seem to recall reading about a rigged election in a questionable democracy where the ballot counters were given several file boxes full of fake ballots in addition to their local precinct ballots, with official anti-tampering seals intact.

So now you need a distribution network for fake boxes and people in the precincts that are in on the conspiracy. Such a large org is leak-prone.

Contrast that with a group of just 1-3 techies.

If the tapering is part of the software, the digital records mean nothing. I don't get why these things get used at all.

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