I don’t really understand the blind trust in paper in person ballots. Historically and currently, elections are stolen all the time whether paper or not. Off the top of my head some recent ones: election irregularities in Venezuela and the Russian referendums in Crimea.
If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.
That's a non-sequitur. Election manipulation is orders of magnitudes easier with voting machine manipulation and might not even be traceable. With paper ballots, you have to swap thousands of ballots that are handled by thousands of people, corrupt or prohibit independent observers, deal with election commissions and overseers, and so on. You can have recounts. With voting machines, you just have to push a software patch to these machines or manipulate the software that interfaces with them. No recount will help.
It’s not a non-sequitur. The thesis behind the push for in person paper is predicated on the idea that it makes it prohibitively difficult to steal an election. That’s demonstrably untrue based on current and historical examples.
As another example, you don’t have to swap the ballots at all. Somewhere in the chain of custody, someone could just “lose” ballots for a region that is projected to vote against whoever they’re trying to fix the election for. They could forge or lose some other accompanying paperwork that was to manage those ballots, too. Or they could not bother doing that either because what are you going to do, redo the election?
Cooking up examples is sort of pointless. There are always going to be new and unexpected ways to commit fraud. The actual root issue isn’t technological. It’s sociological trust.
If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.