I haven’t been shy in expressing my desire that voting in an election involve my making a mark on a piece of paper. I’m OK with mechanized vote-tallying, assuming the tallies are subjected to random audit, but I still want a piece of paper available for a hand-count if something goes wrong.
For example, see this story from the Times Herald-Record:
The outcome of Tuesday’s $70 million school construction proposition will be lost forever in the turn of the voting machine counters.
As the counters on both machines hit 999, they each rolled back to 000 like an overused car odometer.
The question that will never be answered is, for which side were those 1,998 votes cast?
The story provides the details, but basically a school district was using levered voting machines in a local election. The machines had a known limitation that they couldn’t handle more than 999 votes being cast for a particular choice, but it never seemed likely that that mark would ever be a factor, for various considerations.