Pen and paper have a great lot of advantages over electronic voting systems:
- cheap: incredibly cheap.
- Does not need technical personnel
- Is portable. You don't need to wire remote locations just for the elections.
- The ballot boxes are usually transparent or with big windows, which make vote stuffing hard
- political parties and common citizens alike can watch the vote-counting procedure
Last week here in Chile was a big election. Each city elected their mayor for the next four years.
And there are several cities where the process has been objected.
Solution: have a manual counting of ballots.
The confront that account with the data held by the officers in charge, the voting local officers and the political parties officers present in each voting local, who in almost all the cases took pictures of the voting totals published in each local and of each voting station, in addition to their own manual counts.
Is a simple process, with many observation points.
True, is boring and sometimes just plainly disappointing. Especially if, as is my case, in charge of a voting station for 9th time.
But, as your Winston Churchill said:
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
But for that sentence to be true, a very secure and tamper proof system is needed.
R