With each small revelation about aberrations in the 2016 US election, it is becoming more plausible that the voting totals were changed in Republicans' favor by Russian hacking. No wonder, because the system is wide open to exploit. The reason? Voting machines.
Almost every other country in the world manages perfectly well with paper ballots and manual counting, and still has a vote count ready during the night after election day. This includes India with a population of more than a billion people. Paper ballots are incredibly secure compared to the cheap and outdated equipment used by most states for electronic voting. Reports on security tests by white hat hackers tell horror stories of laughably insecure machines that can be hacked in seconds and reprogrammed to yield any desired result. It's time for the US to realize that voting machines are nothing but a huge security risk and a threat to democracy.
If paper ballots are used for the 2018 and 2020 elections, we can at least be reasonably certain that the vote count actually reflects the opinion of the voters.
