Why Paper Ballots Are the Way to Go

by Staff Writer

Voter fraud diminishes the value of legitimate votes and corrupts the election process as a whole. When it comes to preventing fraud and accurately counting the vote, there is no better process than using paper ballots collected at polling stations accessible only to registered and qualified voters with ID. It is vital that paper ballots exist physically, in a form that anyone can inspect.

There are several known ways to commit voter fraud such as ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting, fraudulent voter rolls, and lost or misdirected mail-in ballots, and the use of paper ballots collected from registered voters prevents all of them. How? These paper ballots reveal transparent results that can be examined and verified in the event of suspected fraud.

Electronic voting machines are subject to various forms of manipulation including hacking, misdirecting or miscounting votes. When fraud indeed occurs, only the software on the machine or server, which is often complicit in the fraud, can attempt to verify the results. Trying to connect these bits, bytes and lines of codes to the votes actually cast is a nightmare, as several dramatic voting machine failures, such as the primary polling in Iowa, have recently demonstrated.

Our right to vote is a fundamental part of our republic. It is this ability to choose our leaders through evaluation and consensus that creates a government that is responsible to its citizens. Why, then, risk compromising this fundamental right by using an arbitrary and unreliable vote-counting process? These expensive and finicky machines require intense security processes that are hardly secure and do not guarantee every legitimate vote is counted – or even that every vote is legitimate.

Paper ballots guarantee that in case of suspected fraud, such as more votes being counted than there are registered voters (as happened in a Washington State election ), the ballots can be checked by a legitimate audit process. Paper ballots printed in a clear and legible fashion, unlike the recent vote selection process in Texas that had electronic voting machines votes changing before the voters' eyes!

Paper ballots also keep the results, as well as jobs counting and verifying those results, in our own state and counties. Much of the manufacture, software and data storage for alternative methods rely on large corporations such as Amazon to store the data, Microsoft to host the operating software, and offshore manufacturing to build the machines. When corrupt entities or rogue states want to influence elections, you can be sure that paper ballots counted by our own people is the safest way to go.