You can do that here in the US. Problem being that this is administered by humans, and can be manipulated. People can be denied access to help with their ballots, or resources can be restricted to prevent anyone from getting help. The same way you can selectively reduce the number of polling places or voting equipment in particular neighborhoods to impact the vote. So the more people who can vote unassisted, without some manipulable step like getting a medical certificate, the better.
Or you simply wander off with ballot boxes between the polling places, alter their contents, or even just create plausible suspicion that this has taken place so that whole boxes of ballots need to be discarded.
Because only the ballots record the votes, once you do that there is no way to know what the impact was and whether an election result is valid.
This is probably the classic, and most common method of election fraud. And the US has a long history of that sort of thing being used to disadvantage specific groups. Though predominantly at the state and local level, so it doesn’t require great expense or lots of people. Just partisan election workers, or loyal sheriffs.
Things like counting ballots on site (difficult without machines), and creating redundant, checkable records (impossible to do properly without machines) are intended to help prevent this.
The issues and noise about the machines come down to a couple of things.
First a lot of the machines used in the US are just poorly made, unreliable and over expensive. Which causes delays and lines at polling places, which lowers turnout. And selectively lowering turnout lets you manipulate elections on much grander scale than losing a few ballot boxes.
Second. Since the machines are now computers, they now have computer style security issues. And most of them have been designed without any concern for controlling that. When the voting machine can be hacked you got serious questions about whatever records they’re keeping. Whether they’re valid, how to prove their valid. And even if those records are valid, they can be broken or manipulated to magnify number 1. If you can make machines go down for 30 minutes every 15 votes, you cause lines and lower turnout.
Third. Since many of these voting machines don’t use a hand ballot, independent of the machine, as the input. There’s no alternative record to check the machines against. And no fall back if the machines fail. Which means you can’t deal with 1 or 2.
Voting or counting machines aren’t the only solution to this. Vote by mail works even better in a lot of ways (and requires hand ballots by its nature). But these things didn’t spring up because ATM manufacturers thought they’d be a good way to make money. They’re a response to actual problems, that have actually repeatedly happened in the US, and from what I recall are pretty common in Italy.
People are pissed about it because its not being done well. And that’s increasing our election problems, not solving the problems it was meant to solve.
