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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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So what makes this better than a pencil mark on paper?
Nothing. Americans getting ripped off by some company selling bullshit at the expense of their democratic legitimacy.
You can count the votes faster... but who cares about that when you can just take longer?
Likewise, electronic voting just introduces the doubt of legitimacy, even if voting is totally safe and legit.
Note that the paper ballots generally don't take longer to count, they are generally digitally scanned in the same way the printouts from the touchscreen machines are.
It might speed up voting as a tap is a little faster than filling a bubble, but then again a wide tip marker would fix that, but then you might spoil more ballots when people aren't sure if they mismarked it.
I guess but we still have pencils and teams of humans counting. I agree its the safest and easiest to audit.
Swapping a pen or marker could spoil a box if some funky ink is introduced.
Here in Sweden votes usually take about a week to finish counting, including re-checks and such. It's not so bad.
What is bad is that we're 40 days in and the government still hasn't been established. Useless pieces of shit.
Pencil marks are prone to issues of stray marks, invalid choices (like choosing two candidates for a single office where you can only choose one), incomplete marks like where there's only a dot (or ✖️ or ✔️) when you're instructed to actually fill in the whole bubble. Many of these types of marking rules can invalidate an improperly marked ballot. And pencil marking is also subject to regular old mistakes, like when someone bubbles in the candidate other than their intended candidate, by following the row/table alignment incorrectly.
The ballot marking machine is helpful for making sure that the ballot generated isn't invalid, and prevents certain categories of mistakes.
Well, for starters...
Nobody mentioned punch card ballots.
Punch card ballots are supposed to be much better than pen/pencil and paper and that ended in disaster.
What the fuck do punch card ballots have to do with pen and paper?
Double-counting