Klathmon

A well run paper voting system allows anyone and everyone to watch the ballot box all day, and doesn't allow anyone (literally nobody) to open the box before it's time to count the ballots.

If someone were to try that in somewhere like the UK, the news would be all over it. And if they were also strong armed into keeping quiet at every single voting location that they did this, then it's basically a military takeover of the country and the votes won't matter anyway.

I'm guessing he can't be too thrilled about it...

Not to mention it completely removes the ability for you as a voter to verify your vote was cast.

With (well run) paper ballots, you can cast your vote, then pull up a chair and sit there and watch the box all day if you want. You can count along with the votes, you can make sure nobody is ballot stuffing or removing them without counting any.

But when it comes to complex cryptography, even if it were somehow magically made perfectly unbreakable, there are only a handful of people in the entire country that are capable of auditing a system like that.

It's a LOT of power to put on a few people, while making it basically impossible for the layperson to ensure their votes are counted.

Are there any checks in place to make sure this stuff doesn't happen, or is it left up to the person doing the work?

So in your scenario, you need tens of thousands of people to just take your vote and cast it?

Then you need zero of those people to talk, zero of those people to expose you, zero of those people to make a mistake.

And of course you need this to be geographically diverse. 10,000 votes for your choice of president in one county won't do a damn thing. You'd need to do this process at thousands of precincts across the US, across multiple states. And it ALL has to happen on election day, flawlessly.

Going by 2016, there were a total of around 130,000,000 votes cast. 1% of that is 1,300,000. Let's assume you need to pay each person say $1000 (probably more, I know I sure as hell wouldn't do it for $1000, but it's a good starting number)? That's now 1.3 billion dollars you'd need to give to people across multiple states, multiple counties in each state, and tens or hundreds of precincts per county? For 1% of the vote...

That's one hell of a high bar to reach...