[hrktb]

But then do we understand as well how physical data works, what's the actual shortcomings etc. ?

Personaly I don't think I do, yet even at my personal level I have anecdotes of ink just fading out of paper, or countless of widespread voting frauds from decades ago.

I have the feeling we are putting paper and physical media handling to a higher standard because we don't know as much about it.

[yardie]

Yes. Physical data is well understood. Inks fade, so you use a different formula and keep it out of the light as much as possible. Inks use chemicals, so even if it’s not visible you can still see where the writing was done, inks are pressed into the paper and change the physical structure of the paper in the process.

It takes a concerted effort to change paper ballots.

[hrktb]

The issue is not physical data though. We are talking about a voting system, with agents, suppliers, observers, ballots and people handling them.

For instance some paper elections in Africa have crazy high voter prticipation when not so many people showed up.

That’s an extreme and we could point the finger at blatant corruption. We’re not at these extremes, but where are we on the spectrum?

For instance we don’t have any clear idea of how much corruption we have, to the point that “perceived corruption” is the best approximation.

What I’m going at is, to evaluate how much trust we put in an electronic voting system, we’d need better views at the current system than “paper is better because it’s physical” (that’s not your argument, I take a less nuanced position as example)