This Science Friday Story on a voting machine hacking reminds me of my long standing question. Why does U.S. seemingly insist on electronic voting machines? How about collecting paper ballots at voting stations in the very old fashioned way and counting them using optical character recognition (OCR) machines? U.S. Postal Service should be using OCR to sort letters. So I infer that recognizing people's hand writing at decent accuracy should be well established.
More specifically, a voting station would have physical ballot boxes. No electronic equipment is needed. For voter registration checking, computers may be used, but voter lists printed on paper can do the job.
After a voting period ends, the ballot boxes from voting stations would be collected to a counting place where OCR machines count votes. One desktop size OCR machine should be able to count hundreds of votes per minutes if not thousands. (I saw a demo of such a machine on TV.) Not only votes on the voting day but also absentee votes can be counted in the same manner as long as the same paper ballots are used.
In all cases where I hear/see/read on voting machine security as in the Science Friday story, experts tell to have paper ballots for auditing. But I've never heard they propose not to use electronic voting machines. It might be just my ignorance. If so, that's fine and I'd appreciate if somebody enlightens me.
