I can’t speak for the whole US, but in Connecticut we use a Scantron sort of system where you fill in bubbles on paper and feed it into a machine. This leaves us with a paper ballot in addition to the machine’s totals. Using machines isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it makes the count a lot faster and it’s not like human counters couldn’t lie. If other states don’t have that paper backup though, they should.
Machine prints out paper ballot, properly inscribed with the selected vote so that there’s no “ooh, but there’s a smudge here that might mean a vote for X”. It could also print out a 3D barcode that contains metadata such as time, place, machine, checksums, etc
Human who voted can verify the correct box is selected etc.
Vote slip goes into second machine where it’s counted (or a box for later counts)
Paper vote slips are maintained for recount/validation purposes
The most WTF part is that you all use voting machines. In Canadian federal elections every vote is counted by hand, end of story.
💯 we should all be very wary of voting machines. If it’s not fully open source and cryptographically verifiable, it’s not secure.
Same in the UK
I can’t speak for the whole US, but in Connecticut we use a Scantron sort of system where you fill in bubbles on paper and feed it into a machine. This leaves us with a paper ballot in addition to the machine’s totals. Using machines isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it makes the count a lot faster and it’s not like human counters couldn’t lie. If other states don’t have that paper backup though, they should.
We use the same thing for civic and provincial elections in Canada, but for federal it’s strictly hand count only.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with both.