They want to have the option to cheat and have plausible deniability Simplest explanation

FAIR BUT ALSO OPEN SOURCE ELECTRONIC MACHINES WITH A PAPER RECEIPT YOU MANUALLY DROP IN AN AUDIT BOX IS A FINE COMPROMISE.

I don't see why we can have machines with a tiny open source app running assembly, or c, or maybe python that is verifiable by thousand or millions of programmers that it is only counting.

Isn't that just a expensive pen at some point

Alaskans fill out a paper ballot that is fed into a scanner that counts it. They keep the paper as a backup. It's not like that everywhere?

I love the based innocence of Alaskans. Living in a world we all seek to return to 😁