There are ballots that the machine cannot read but from which voter intent can be discerned by manual review.

With these systems there is less room for error by the voter in addition to fewer spoiled ballots.

You can read it in a manual and it sounds kind of tricky, but it's easy when you see it done. You could put it together yourself. Basically, we save you 200 trips to the hardware store.

With the paper-based system you can see the ballots being marked, you can see them going into a ballot box, if you have good laws you can go watch them count the ballots, and with electronic voting all of that stuff is hidden inside the machines.

Men have become tools of their tools.

The fax machine had been unplugged at the other end.