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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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It scares the shit out of me that the US has so fully adopted voting machines. They are incredibly unreliable and it would be so easy for a bad actor to hack an election. Especially with FPTP, it would be so easy to goose the numbers in a couple of key districts and swing an election for whomever you wanted to win. It's almost definitely already happened several times.
In Canada we still do voting on paper, but then the votes are counted electronically and the paper copy is kept for recounting by a human later if needed. It's sort of the best of both worlds.
It's not everywhere.
States that do vote by mail are just like you describe -- paper ballots collected and counted by computer, with the paper preserved.
Not all states are fully electronic. Many districts (including mine) are run on paper ballots that are then scanned.
I would be more concerned about the upstream tabulation systems. The possibility of making bulk changes is much more harmful than tampering with single voting machines.
There was a mad dash to electronic voting after the Bush v Gore hanging chad fiasco. A lot of people are still focusing on the voting machines vs. the integrity of centralized tabulation systems.