With a scantron voting system every single voter becomes an auditor. That’s orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting caught. Not so with barcodes.
>That’s orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting caught. Not so with barcodes.
When was the last time you had a printer print the wrong thing? Moreover, if an election is close enough that a few votes matter, there's definitely going to be a manual recount, so any advantage is purely academic (eg. knowing that candidate A won by 51.704% rather than 51.703%). Point is, either the error is big enough that it's trivially detected with spot checks, or the margins are so close that a manual recount is performed automatically.
Seems a pretty substantial difference to me.