I would like a clarification about how the system works, because I always thought that votes cast in electronic machines a) left a paper trail and b) were always manually verified.
My idea was that electronic voting machines would be useful for several reason:
- Fast "first count" of votes in election day.
- Less confusion (e.g. "butterfly ballots") for the voters and less void votes.
- Less chance of unintentional void votes (e.g. people putting two ballots in the envelope, or ballots improperly filled)
- Easier for handicapped people (e.g. would allow to connect headphones for blind people)
- Signal possible issues with the process (e.g. if the machine computed results differ significantly from the manually computed results).
But after reading about some claims (which are off-topic for this question), there is a request for a manual recount of several countries with electronic polling stations, and from what I read it sounds like electronic voting results were not manually verified in the first place.
Am I right or wrong? Are machine results always verified manually or not?