Ah, one case out of how many elections? It would also be nice to explain what happened and how. The AfD insisted, together with more right leaning media, on a recount. The happened and gave, initially, one additional seat. The SPD, who lost one seat, challenged that. It went to court, all 33k vote were recounted, roughly 500 corrections were necessary. 13 votes were lost. The AfD lost one seat (they failed to gain more than 5% of the vote). The election was deemed legit, not reelection was necessary.
So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.
Imagine you have a single majority party that controls all the branches of the government. For them paper voting is a solved problem:
- restrict the rights of observers
- on every polling station where there are no observers, stuff the ballot boxes or just write the "right" tallies
- on polling stations with observers get rid of them using the police or just use at-home voting with mobile ballot boxes to commit fraud
- if any single instance of fraud is uncovered and goes to court, use every nitpick possible to dismiss the case
- finally, a single polling station results overturned do not change the result of the election
The problem is solved all right. Of course, letting them implement e-voting doesn't solve anything. But if the Evil Party is ousted from power by the Good Party via, I don't know, a revolution, there's nothing in the system preventing the Good Party from using the same well-tested vote manipulation processes to start winning every election.
But if the Good Party for some reason is forced to implement an end-to-end auditable e-voting system they will have a much harder time manipulating the results.
One prominent case that was _not_ caught by election officials and analytical measures. We have no way to tell how many others didn't get caught because nobody challenged them and our general systems failed.
I'm not arguing that it's a catastrophic failure of the election system. The point is that paper ballots aren't protecting you from manipulation. Had they not challenged the election, the fraud would've gone unnoticed.
And, importantly, it doesn't require coordination, there's no huge conspiracy required for this kind of fraud (and this specific instance also wasn't discovered because one of the perpetrators "spilled the beans"), so "large conspiracies are impossible to pull of" doesn't really apply.
A quick Google search showed alleged voter fraud, always claimed by our right wing AfD. And every time these allegations were investigated, it turned out everything was in order. Last case 2019, Thüringen and Sachsen.
So how many cases are there, in your opinion?
EDIT: You do know, that there was no voter fraud involved? After an investigation and court rulings one year after the election?
Right, at that point we're getting into semantics. If the votes aren't counted correctly, and a group of people are doing it somewhat systematically, I consider that fraud. Given that they were students (and the overall result did not change dramatically), judges were lenient and basically said "mistakes happen, no hard feelings".
I have little doubt that it would have been quite different, had the situation been reversed, but I don't care enough to argue about it with you.
Man, courts mandated a full recount. The only mistake they found was 13 missing votes. Which the court deemed to be within expected margins (don't ask me, I have zero experience with that). The result was a lost seat for the AfD, and an election deemed legitimate. So no fraud whatsoever.
And no, I have zero doubt the judges would have enforced a result that gave the AfD a seat at the expense of another party, if that was what the recounted result said. Only that it didn't.
This was a legal question, one that was answered. What you or I deem fraud or not became irrelevant at that point.
So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.