Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
โWe had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,โ he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
Much easier to protect and verify than any electronic system
Except they have a much higher rate of lost or miscounted ballots.
But the two methods can be used together to create an improved system: electronic ballots with a printed 'receipt'. My state uses this method. Before submitting your ballot, it displays the paper receipt and asks you to confirm your choices. If it's incorrect or you want to change it, you can reject the ballot and it is immediately voided in front of you. If it's fine, you press a button and it submits both the digital and paper copies of your ballot.
Election monitors can then validate the calculated results against the paper receipts.
If you really wanted to be security minded, you could go a step further - have the ballot printing machines keep a per-machine count of ballots they've done and print a ballot with human readable votes and a barcode detailing the same. Have a second machine scan those ballots and drop them into a locked box. None of them are connected to a network or have an accessible open port anywhere on them. There is however a locked access panel on the back of each machine where an SD card is inserted. As ballots are printed and scanned each machine's SD card records what happens. The two types of machines are made by different manufacturers and validated by a third party.
At close of polls, all the machines are asked to report their results. If there is a discrepancy between what the ballot printers report and what the ballot scanners report, it's time for a manual recount of that polling location. Then the SD cards are pulled from all the machines and shipped to the relevant election board to check the contents against the reports. Also manual recount 5% of polling locations (minimum one) selected at random. If discrepancies show up in more than a 1% of polling locations, manual recount the entire election. For all these manual recounts, the human readable portion of the paper ballot is the final authority.
So you still need to count all the paper votes, and hope they didn't use disappearing ink or any other bullshit
Yes, you also need to hope they're not building android replicas of all the voters, too.