Alright, thank you for the information! I still think that those machines are unnecessary but I can see how they are at least not making things worse.

No paper trail still seems like insanity though, especially if auditing comes down to a non-technical person with “training” connecting some box to the machines that then tells them it’s OK.

How does the auditing work in these cases?

Also I found news reports about some US states still using machines without paper trail…

Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.

But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.

And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.

The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.

The one thing they are right about IMO is that voting machines are dangerous, useless garbage that endangers the integrity of the election protests.

The way they used them to do so wasn’t on my list, but still.

EDIT: Wow, so many downvotes. Remember when these concerns were held by mostly left wing techy people? You don’t have to love them now because Trump hates them/uses their presence to spread FUD. The fact that that works should be a strike against having them, FFS! You might think they are fine now but to regular people they are still opaque and scary.