Comment by SkeuomorphicBee
3 years ago
> How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally?
If you want to detect tampering in the central totalling, then all you need is the end of day receipt of each ballot. Exactly like in OP's case.
If you want to detect tampering in a ballot, then you manually recount the individual printed paper votes inside that ballot. That is something that you should do to a random sample of ballots, plus ballots with unusual totals.
> As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
That is simply not true, large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking).
> large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking
In many countries, there are many tens of thousands of individual polling stations. A conspiracy to tamper with enough of them to make a difference isn't going to stay secret for very long because it would have to involve too many people. Tampering with paper ballots just doesn't scale, and in most places, election observers with their old-fashioned Mk I eyeballs are allowed to watch what's going on at every stage.
> (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking)
How would we propose that an average human election observer is supposed to detect whether any particular system involved in electronic voting is - or isn't - in the process of "pulling a heist"?