Basically, all voting systems are vulnerable to mistakes and fraud. The best protection of democracy is a system where all the opposition in the election provide representatives who do well-organized watching of the process and where every step of the election process is open and can be observed clearly. Watching by all the interested parties is fundamental.
Paper ballots are vulnerable to fraud in multitudinous ways, including the following ways:
Paper Ballots Vulnerable to Fraud
Stuffing the ballot box
Putting extraneous marks on the ballot
Making mistakes during the counting process
Losing ballots, ending up with a mismatch in # of ballots and # of people who voted
Torn ballots
Ballots marked with overvotes and spoiled in a number of ways
Different count results every time the ballots are hand-counted
Stacks of ballots can be made before the election and surreptitiously swapped
Look at the antics of James Michael Curley in Boston “Vote Early and Often”
Hand-counting ballots produces more errors than machine tabulation
counting by hand is slow
Late-night counting tends to produce more errors, with up to a 35% error rate
Recounts of hand-counted ballots always end up with significant differences in the results
Contested elections of hand-counted paper ballots often see dramatic changes in the results
Source: WinterGreen Research, Inc.
In the November 2023 election Shasta County, California abandoned its plans to hand count ballots, citing high turnout. The Republican county electronically tabulated ballots following warnings from the secretary of state. hand counting ballots is incredibly complicated, expensive, inefficient and — most importantly — wildly inaccurate.
In the United States ballots are for lots of contests and ballot questions. Even within the same city there may be 1,000 different ballot layouts. Hand counting is checking the marks for all the candidates on the ballot. Local offices have different candidates in each district. Offices like water commissioner, school committee, village commissioner. and judges may have different candidates for different districts.
In Arizona, the Mohave County Elections Department planed to hand count the results of the 2024 election. As a test, a seven-member board counted 850 ballots from the 2022 election by hand. Here’s what the process for the hand count looked like:
“The seven (7) member hand count board consists of one person calling (caller) out the race and candidates’ names; two people watching (watchers) making sure the ‘caller’ calls out the information correctly; two people marking (markers) the race on their separate tally sheets; and two ‘watchers’ making sure each ‘marker’ marks the race correctly. This board is made up of an equal number of people from the two major parties and/or parties not designated.“
Nobody will do that work for free. The additional cost for hand-counting votes would be $1.14 million for the 2024 election. To conduct a hand count election at scale in a state like Michigan would require a vast increase in costs.
Studies of hand counts in New Hampshire and Wisconsin have found that hand counting is substantially less accurate than machine tabulation.