Comment by varispeed

The public can observe that they choose their ballot/mark their ballot and drop it in a sealed box when they vote. If they want to they can hang around and observe how the box is brought in to another room and each ballot is counted and that the result is reported in to the bigger system where they later can see the results from all other districts and that the result from their district match with the result they can see in the official results. It's easy to understand. It's easy to understand and observe. If you digitize the voting process it's much much harder to understand and only computer scientists and mathematicians really understands what's going on. That's not sustainable imo.

> Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

Except that people know what paper looks and feels like, they know how it absorbs ink, they know its various properties, they can _read_ whatever is printed on them, and they can see that the marks they make (or a ballot marking device does for them) are faithfully visible on the paper. With paperless machines there is nothing comparable.

The problem is much simpler. If people could verify if their votes were counted correctly, at least 1 out of 20,000 would claim that their vote was counted incorrectly while it wasn't. Some are malicious, some pushed the wrong button, some just forgot that they changed their opinion since then.

That would be a very vocal minority that would immediately destroy any trust in the system.