I don’t think a scantron machine not connected to the Internet would sow distrust. We have seen them in our high schools. And Adversarial observers can validate the results on test samples quite easily.
Which raises the question- why do we use the really awkward, blackbox and sometimes networked machines that we do, manufactured by weird companies rather than whoever makes scantron machines or whatever?
And this isn’t just about “dumb Republicans” or what have you. Here’s Scott Aaronson [1] in 2016:
> For that matter, if Russia or some other power hacked the trivially-hackable electronic voting machines that lack paper trails—machines that something like a third of American voters still used this election—there’s an excellent chance we’d never find out.
“Antivirus on voting machines? You’re doing it wrong.” [2]
The thing that really gets me is, even if you wanted to use machines, you wouldn’t use the weird machines made by shady companies that we do. Different counties would buy standard scantron machines used to grade high school finals off the shelf, and verify it in ways that are obvious to all of us.
Why do we use the really awkward, blackbox and sometimes networked machines that we do, manufactured by weird companies rather than whoever makes scantron machines or whatever?
Because they’re cheap, states have to fund their own elections, and no governor will ever fund an election over schools or infrastructure.
The real question is why elections are not federally funded. The answer is that states are afraid election funds will be withheld over speciously related issues, just as highway funds are withheld over drinking ages. IMHO the correct change is a constitutional amendment guaranteeing federal funding for all state elections that can’t be withheld for any reason.
At most you could make an argument that federal elections should be federally funded. But I don't even know whether the US actually has any federal elections that the wider public participates in?
Eg the election for president is officially an election for some state officials that then go off and participate in the real federal election for president. (Of course, this is oversimplified.)
There's no way the small efficiency gain from automation is worth that cost.