The cost and unwieldiness of paper ballots is a feature, not a bug.<p>A paper system has hundreds or thousands of individuals, some percentage of them mutually hostile, who must be subverted in order to subvert the election.<p>A digital system is one stolen key, one bad sysadmin, one disgruntled programmer, from total compromise. They might be <i>proved</i> &quot;safe&quot;, but they cannot be <i>observed</i> in the way that the mechanics surrounding a paper ballot can be.