A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.
The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan reader. This system actually hits me as an ideal: the electronic reader can be simpler and fairly decoupled from other systems, and each voter will leave a paper trail that should clearly indicate their intent. Admittedly, the electronic readers we use are probabally insecure and awful, but the concept hits me as fairly reasonable.
In this case, we are in the early voting period, and there are a reduced number of polling places - and each polling place can be used by any voter in that county, which means that voters might be (and probabally are) voting on slightly different races and using slightly different ballots. These machines remove the need for the early polling places to have a lot of valid paper ballots on hand while still allowing each voter to see and vote in all races they would be able to vote in on election day.
It's actually a fairly good use of voting machines, even if it would be nice if the machines were something other than terrible.
I've lived and voted in Austin for 15 years and have never seen a single paper ballot. Our voting machines are, and have been, simple screens with a scrolly-wheel interface. They produce no paper record for you to review or deposit anywhere.
This would, to me, seem to be a minimum requirement for anyone to have any belief that their vote has been counted correctly.
http://www.kut.org/post/travis-county-voters-are-getting-vot...
When I arrive, they ask for my ID (i.e., passport), look up my registered address, and the computer automatically prints out the correct set of ballots, and an envelope with the correct return address. I take them to the voting booth, stamp on the candidates I like, put the ballots into the envelope, seal the envelope, and put it in a box, and later all the envelopes in the box will be sorted and sent to the correct district so that they can be counted at the actual election day.
It's 2018, folks. This isn't magic.
they ask for my ID
This really upset a lot of people and they wanted _something_ to be done. A lot of people naively felt computerizing it would automatically fix everything. They were wrong, but that's how we got here.
George Bush vs. Al Gore and the hanging chads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
After the election the rallying cry was the losing side was that the human factor should be eliminated in order to have pristine elections.
Of course, we all know that electronic voting machines are still made by humans.
I still think they should be paper, but those are the reasons.
For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date.
This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.
This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP.
The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mexico/comments/9rcyyt/ah_caray_no_...
Voting machines are just plain stupid.
You fill in the center of the arrow for who you're voting for, and there's an entry at the bottom for writen-ins. Afterwards this is scanned by a machine and the paper put in storage.
There are, however, concerns about coercion. Always tradeoffs.
Fast results, but still hand-verifiable.