[josephg]

This is really interesting. Here in Australia we still use paper ballets for the lower house of parliament. I volunteered as a “scrutineer” for one of the parties, which let me go into the warehouse where the ballots were being counted and watch. As an scrutineer, you physically look over the shoulder of the person counting votes and double check their work. You can’t touch anything, but if you disagree with the vote, you can flag it. The voting slip gets physically sent to a committee somewhere for final judgement.

I highly recommend the experience if you’re Australian - it was very cool seeing democracy in action. I personally have a lot more faith in our system of voting after seeing it in action first hand.

That said, the senate votes are all typed into a computer by the election officials. It’s just too hard to do preferential voting by hand with ~200 candidates on the ballot.