> With a computer, you flip a bit and there's no record

That’s a turn of phrase I didn’t expect on HN.

Do we work in a field where programs don’t have logs, gateways don’t exist, checksums and securing data integrity is not a thing ?

I think HN understands better than most that any digital data is fragile and ephemeral. Theres entire fields around just preventing tampering with it.

But then do we understand as well how physical data works, what's the actual shortcomings etc. ?

Personaly I don't think I do, yet even at my personal level I have anecdotes of ink just fading out of paper, or countless of widespread voting frauds from decades ago.

I have the feeling we are putting paper and physical media handling to a higher standard because we don't know as much about it.

Yes. Physical data is well understood. Inks fade, so you use a different formula and keep it out of the light as much as possible. Inks use chemicals, so even if it’s not visible you can still see where the writing was done, inks are pressed into the paper and change the physical structure of the paper in the process.

It takes a concerted effort to change paper ballots.

The issue is not physical data though. We are talking about a voting system, with agents, suppliers, observers, ballots and people handling them.

For instance some paper elections in Africa have crazy high voter prticipation when not so many people showed up.

That’s an extreme and we could point the finger at blatant corruption. We’re not at these extremes, but where are we on the spectrum?

For instance we don’t have any clear idea of how much corruption we have, to the point that “perceived corruption” is the best approximation.

What I’m going at is, to evaluate how much trust we put in an electronic voting system, we’d need better views at the current system than “paper is better because it’s physical” (that’s not your argument, I take a less nuanced position as example)

> a field where programs don’t have logs, gateways don’t exist, checksums and securing data integrity is not a thing

Yes, that's the field of voting machine construction - it's lowest-bidder garbage built by and sold to people with no concept of reliability.

It's so bad that Diebold had to spin off and rebrand their voting machine division, out of fear that security and reliability issues with the EVMs would tarnish their main ATM business.

The ATM security is also pretty bad (and constantly plagued with skimmers), it's just that you can refund money but you can't refund votes.

We also work in the field with a history of all these measures being circumvented.

The closest parallel we have is DRM, and the track record there is.. less than stellar.

Picoseconds or at most a couple of nanoseconds