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Real paper ballots are a must: N.Y. needs to get rid of touchscreen voting machines
(www.nydailynews.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Politics
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I'm inclined to agree. It will take longer to count them, but you can't easily hack paper ballots.
Germany, with 100% paper ballots, has preliminary results in by the end of the night. That's preliminary as in "everything has been counted, but we haven't double-checked anything yet". The final result comes later and has never differed in even close to significant ways from the preliminary one. Most of the time delay is not due to voting but to give people and courts time to deal with any challenge there might be.
The US is a whole lot bigger than Germany though. Each state administers their own election also. There's no unified system or framework that they all have to follow, and if one was attempted to be forced upon them, they'd cry "states rights" and challenge it in court.
This country truly is due for a reset.
What if I told you that Germany is a federation. NRW would be the fifth largest US state, Bremen the third smallest (actually, almost identical population to DC), most of all the US has more states. They can do stuff in parallel that's no excuse to not have quick election results. And now don't come with "but there's so much space in between" you're not sending the results via horse buggy are you.
And, no, of course the federation doesn't legislate on state elections. It gets to say how federal (and EU) elections are run. State's rights my ass in Germany the federation has no tax office, it's all collected by the states, and their police can't put boots on the ground outside of international borders (incl. airports) and the train system (cf Amtrak cops). Certainly can't just decide to invade a city like is happening in LA. They also don't have anything like ICE, that's all state responsibility.
Pretty much every modern election system tabulates the ballots electronically, but keeps around the paper ballots for random recounts or investigations. The only reason not to have the paper involved is if you're cheap / incompetent / don't care about election security, or if you specifically want to steal the election.
The Republican Party is all of those.