[staunch]

You're trusting that all the ballots are present, that no fake ballots have been added, and none have been tampered with, that the officials are all acting in good faith, aren't making mistakes, haven't been bribed, etc.

Do you really think paper ballots have not been used to rig elections? Because that's absurd given the current situation in Belarus and the long history of ballot tampering going back thousands of years.

Paper ballot counting is security theater. A system based on math and software could be provably secure.

[throwaway936482]

Of course paper ballots can be undermined. The point is that you can easily tell that they have been undermined by the big burly blokes following people into polling stations and threatening you if you don't vote for the preferred candidate, or the ballot boxes turning up in the swamp. You're asking us to trust a magic algorithm that, as I pointed out in another comment, is likely to be proprietary and back doored to hell and back because it is controlled and implemented by the sort of government that rigs elections. This opens up the possibility of subtle, undetectable election tampering, which is much harder to do with a properly run manual system that everyone can understand and participate in.

[staunch]

You rely on "magic" algorithms every time you fly in an airplane or drive a car. Because they're not "magic" at all but based in reality, on math and science.