There are lots of reasons to dislike the paper ballots used in American elections.

Paper ballots delay election results. They have to be removed from their envelopes. They have to be manually inserted into tabulators. And all of this has to be watched by bipartisan teams.

Paper ballots are expensive. Printing millions of envelopes, instruction sheets and ballots adds up — especially when there’s a paper shortage (as there was in 2022). So does the postage. So does the ink.

Paper ballots are environmentally unfriendly. We probably destroy a small forest every election.

And paper ballots are inconvenient. We shop electronically. We bank electronically. It would be super convenient to vote on our cell phones for the next president.

But there are two very important positives of paper ballots that outweigh the negatives:

Unfortunately, we were recently reminded that Number 2 is a real threat. 

On June 23 an unknown hacker, but likely somebody connected to Iran, targeted an informational website hosted by the Arizona secretary of state and uploaded pictures of Iranian revolutionary Ayotalla Khomeini with the text “Khomeini's followers woke up. Our erosive revenge has begun.”

The secretary’s office stopped further online defacement and sent out a news release on July 1 to notify the public of the attack.

The attack posed no threat to voter registration records. The........

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