I Gotta Agree with Texas Republicans On This One

This is number 3 on the list of things that I never thought that I would say.

Republicans in a number of areas in Texas are considering hand counting ballots, and various voting experts are predicting an apocalypse.

These "Experts Think" think that it will be too slow, (47,587,254 ballots in the UK in one evening in their last general election), too prone to fraud, (Vote counting is public), or too expensive (Costs less than the purchase and licenses for computerized voting machines).

Also, clearly the experts are not IT folks:

Link to original

The obvious question is whether or not Republicans would use hand counting in an attempt to subvert elections, and the obvious answer is, "Yes."

That being said the Republicans have used EVERY aspect of voting in an attempt to subvert elections, including purging legitimate voters, colluding with America's enemies during conflict, systematically under-supplying voting infrastructure to Democratic Party areas, criminalizing voting assistance, Gerrymandering, etc.

With paper ballots, the subversion has to be done one ballot at a time.  With computers, you can do this in bulk.

It should also be noted

Even without the obvious points, that paper ballots marked by hand are cheaper, can be counted almost as quickly, and are less vulnerable to large scale fraud, paper ballots are more credible to large sections of the populace than any form of electronic voting.

Counting paper ballots is a process that is understood by everyone, while electronic voting machines are black boxes whose internal workings are trade secrets carefully kept away from the public.

While it may take a few hours longer to count the vote, and while there are costs for securely storing ballots for some time after the elections, the advantages of paper ballots outweigh both of these.