this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Every system can be subverted. Ballot boxes or stacks of votes stuff or lost... The integrity is in the checks and balances, verifiable oversight.
And with voting machines there is no verifiable oversight.
You just kind of have to trust that the software that is running on the voting machine is actually correctly tallying your vote, and not doing shenanigans behind the scene. Even if the code is open source, and everyone knew how to read code, you cannot reasonably guarantee that that is the software that is running inside the black box that is a voting machine.
With paper voting you can observe the entire process from start to finish. There are no black boxes which just spit out an answer that you simply have to trust.
The machine can print a human and machine readable copy. Then feed that into another machine after verifying and you have two independent digital counts that can verify each other. You also have the paper that can be manually counted if you need to be extra sure.
This is what we had for a few years. Now the first step is replaced by manual bubbling. Still have the scan for the instant digital count though.
The whole system is built on trust. With regular voting, we trust that there are enough people counting and validating each voting box that there won't be much tampering. Each group only has to validate their own box, and so the trust required for it is not that high. We also know that each physical vote introduced in the box is there.
With machine voting, even if you use local machines that give results to humans, which then are inputted in a bigger database for counting, the entity doing the initial count for the district "box", is singular, and there is no way to manually check unless there's a bunch of humans watching every anonymous "ballot" of that box are registered correctly. You can't really do that when the ballot is an "anonymous" input in a machine, there's no paper trail verifiable by the small trusted human group we used to trust.
Even if there are a bunch of machines, trust is lost. Now imagine the actual useful proposals where you can vote from the phone Yada yada. Trust is completely lost.
The only way to be able to validate is for your vote to have an ID, that you and only you know is yours, and for each vote ID to be public. That way each individual person can validate that their vote is being correctly counted in their district, and trusted individuals can correctly corroborate that the amount of imputed votes makes sense with the amount of people registered to vote in that district.
That puts at risk that people without tech expertise wouldn't know how to validate or even store their secret ID so others don't know it's them, and that we would need to trust the government that they don't store a database of ID - citizen.
And yeeeeeess, blockchain based ledgers would be good for nonce (secret ID) based voting, but even if that tech works well, socially is still hard to implement as stated before.