And if the elections were frauded but people believed it was legit, this creates a WAY bigger problem. A problem that your country doesn't have because it doesn't have insitutional fraud like brazil had.
Elections based on paper ballots are difficult to rig on a large scale, if you have enough eyes watching the process. The more physical ballots you want to rig, the more people have to be involved in the conspiracy, the higher the chance of discovery.
Elections on paper ballot depend much more on the trust in the local levels. That is a problem in a country with lots of small cities where there are people that basically control the entire city. It is not very difficult for them to rig the system in this case. With electronic ballot they can't, the system is much more complicated to rig, you need to tamper with the machines directly and that is impossible to do without being very obvious.
When we used paper we have lots of frauds exactly because of that, a local baron could rig the entire voting system pretty easily with a variety of methods, the same is not possible with electronic ballots.
I suspect that it really depends on the country structure and culture.
As someone living in a small country were vote is mandatory (it makes creating false votes near impossible), voting booths are maned by people more or less drawn at random (there is still criteria that make you part of the drawing pool but they are centered on your education level so you generally have people without any connections between them), local baron aren't really a thing and the justice system is quite independent, electronic seem a lot riskier because it concentrate part of the verification process in some hands contrary to the current system.
Maybe it is hard to attack that particular system on a high scale, I don't know, I haven't studied it. Again, my point is that the trust it the problem.
It is way easier to distrust a paper ballot than an electronic one. It is my understanding that in places where there is paper ballots you can request recounts and those recounts can vary the number of votes on each count. That would make me way more suspicious that someone vanished with my vote than with an electronic impartial system, which for sure accounts precisely the same amount of votes every time. That alone makes me trust a digital vote more than a paper ballot.
You may trust it more but many of your fellow citizens may be easily convinced of voter fraud, precisely because electronic voting was used. This is not hypothetical, just look at US and Brazil.
What are you saying? Most people that try to cast doubt in the Brazilian electoral system is laughed at promptly. I would argue the misinformation against the fairness of election results had way more traction in the US than they did in Brazil.
Also the US is not the best case in point to argue with election fairness as within the past 30 years they ended up electing the candidate that lost the 2000 vote because of error in the counting of those paper ballots, in a time in which the electronic votes had already been implemented in Brazil. Messing up this badly in an election is reason enough to abandon paper ballots for good, as it exposed how much more unsecure the whole process is.
That is absolutely true, the US elected bush when al gore won the national vote, and more recently trump convinced the people there was electoral fraud in 2020 and they invaded the capitol because electronic voting was not used.
You dont need to attack tthe system in high scale if you need few votes to win. This happens in small cities. You dont need a big conspiracy with tons of people. You just need a pontual one.
But they do get oversight. The political parties have both the self interest and money to send representatives to every polling station to check if everything was done correctly. Why would they not try and do that if they are the most interested to get proper results?
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u/Witty_Milk4671 11h ago
And if the elections were frauded but people believed it was legit, this creates a WAY bigger problem. A problem that your country doesn't have because it doesn't have insitutional fraud like brazil had.