[rhino369]

You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked.

The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too.

You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.

[dghf]

> You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.

In the UK's 2014 elections for the European Parliament, a Scottish voter wrote against the four parties/candidates listed: "wank"; "wank"; "good guy"; "wank".

The vote was deemed valid as the voter had expressed a clear preference.

(Source: https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/pho...)

[brassic]

There was another case where the voter drew a penis next to the conservative candidate and it counted as a vote:

http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...

[Symbiote]

Ballots are counted by hand in the UK.

There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064

[rhino369]

Yikes that is even worse. Hand counts have been shown to be off by 1-2%.

[hacker_9]

Actually in the UK votes are counted manually by people in big halls under watch by accredited observers. No voting machine in the process at all.

[robryan]

Sure that happens to a small portion, if the result is close enough though you can go back over them by hand.

The difference is that the voting machine makes it possible to hack the paper trail.

[RCortex]

Please post a source or more of an explanation before spreading FUD like this...