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> It's not possible to steal numerous paper-based elections in a row

Why not? Estonia had paper ballot voting for the entire soviet occupation of about half a century, didn't have any effect on the amount of rigging though. Same with Russia today, they use paper ballots, but results still don't matter.

Paper vs electronic voting is just a small component in election fairness and there are upsides and downsides to both.

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Because there's no theoretical room for fraud if you design the paper ballot system correctly so that the process is observed by independent and opposing parties and everyone is doing their job.

The key point being "everyone is doing their job". You need to make the system so transparent and involve so many observers/auditors that there's nowhere for corruption to hide.

If you threaten the opposition with prison (or worse) if they tell anyone about your fraud then you don't have a democracy to begin with. The only way to preserve any semblance of legitimacy is if you manage to keep thousands to tens of thousands of people quiet on all of this.

In the GDR the 1989 voting was an important trigger for the revolution. The citizens counted the votes too and could thus published election results independent of the official ones. So in effect it does stop that the rigging can be hidden.

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