Paper ballots allow a much faster throughput of voters and more or less eliminate waiting lines. If machines are used, the number is often inadequate, they break down sometimes and you often get a couple of really slow people really limiting throughput. With paper ballots, all you need is a private place for someone to mark their ballot. These are usually little booths that are much cheaper than voting machines and you can have many of them much more cheaply than a few voting machines. Dropping the ballot in the box takes almost no time and even if you have an optical scanner reading the ballots, that goes very quickly--a matter of seconds. It is much harder to rig things so that voting is unacceptably slow in minority areas if paper ballots are used, because throughput is intrinsically much higher.

Off topic, but your comment reminded me that an ex military guy was pushing Victory Coffee on Shark Tank, Friday night.

I have been listening to an archived reading (from the '70s) of 1984, on PRI KPFT Houston, every Tuesday morning for the past couple of months.

I had the TV on as background noise Friday night, and hoping for an additional heat source since my heater stopped working, and did a double take when I heard the name of the product.

I immediately texted my daughter, son and brother about it. None "got" it because of how long ago they read the book, but I explained its reference.

I "got" a chill down my spine, though.

Life immitating art?

Or screw it up.

When it's all digital, there's no physical evidence, ever, of the way things actually were. Which is how they like it.

a matching serialize receipt containing the voters ballot choices, to be held by the voter with a positive rule that carries the weight of law instituting a recount, in part or in full, be carried out should votes be lost or missing. Violations such as failure to report any lost votes are charged with felonie(s).

I think it's pretty simple. We need a lot of people, a lot of money, and goals of changing the political system, removing those in power and bringing to justice those who have committed the crimes.
It's not simple to do of course, but if you think about it, there's not much we can do other than overpower them with our numbers.

authority. it just generally chooses not to exert it.

Section 4
1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Travis County Clerk here - who handles elections among other things - has teamed up with critics of our current electronic voting system to design a new system that is more secure, and is able to be audited by third parties. You still vote electronically, but when you're done, the machine prints out a paper ballot, as well.

It's called STAR vote. (STAR is short for “Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable”)

Can this Texas county fix America’s electronic voting problem?

Dana DeBeauvoir, a spirited 62-year-old who has overseen the election process in Travis County, Texas, since 1986, has been fending off complaints about voting for decades. In recent years, most of those complaints have been about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

So one year, when a group of voting activists asked her to deliver a keynote speech at their annual conference in Washington, D.C., she decided to give them a piece of her mind.

“I told that group, basically: ‘Shame on you for picking on, and beating up on the wrong person, and for basically only throwing rocks, and not doing anything about the problem itself. All you’re doing is picking on an administrator and contributing nothing to the solution.’ So I challenged them, and I said: ‘YOU come up with an answer to these security issues, and I’ll help build it.'”

They did. The result is a system that could be a more secure alternative to our flawed voting mechanisms. It records votes in a public, digital, anonymous ledger so that individual voters can look up the record of their vote and see that it was counted correctly, and third parties can audit the results.

One other good thing about it is that it would be a lot cheaper.

Right now, we spend a lot of money paying the companies who've designed our current systems fees to use their proprietary software.

DeBeauvoir’s office is budgeting $4 million for a pilot project for next year (a million of which still has to be approved by the county commissioners’ court). She envisions the county controlling the rights to the software, and a commercial company like IBM coming in to provide services and tech support. Other jurisdictions would be free to use the software for their own voting systems.

There's a lot more about it in the article.

And here's a second article from The Texas Tribune back in July 2014.

The new system will be county-owned and -operated, relying on open-source software that can be shared across jurisdictions and only requires equipment that can be bought commercially off the shelf, like tablets and scanners.

Here's one more article about STAR Voting from November 16, 2016 - the most recent article I could find. It's from Fortune Magazine.

This Is How We'll Be Voting in 2020

At the same time, there’s little profit motive for entrenched voting equipment manufacturers to substantially change current voting technology, which is a hodgepodge of touch- and touch-button screens, optical scanners, and paper ballots. Add to that a federal and state certification process for new technology that can take years and easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you’re basically left with the status quo—and systems that get an overhaul once every 20 to 30 years.

“I have managed to pull together $4 million to get us started and to phase one, which is building the prototype,” DeBeavoir says, adding it could take more than a year and close to $1 million to get her system certified.

I had read somewhere else that she'd hoped to be finished in time for the 2018 gubernatorial elecion in Texas in 2018 - and it might be. I'm -thinking- that voters in Travis County would use it first (in 2018) and then be rolled out to other jurisdictions who wanted to use it by 2020, but I'm not sure.

but that's old-time Tammany Hall shit. The ward bosses used to collect names off tombstones and out of obituaries, and then tell their minions to go vote under those names.

Tammany Hall was the Democratic machine in New York City, 1786-c. mid-1960s.

repair them - all became "forgotten knowledge".

Once that kind of knowledge is forgotten, it is rarely if ever recovered.

Addendum: They did require a lot of maintenance.