Especially as an (ex-) coder you should ask for a paper ballot!

As for whether or not that's possible: Which location are we talking about?

This will depend on your state I believe

One advantage of mail in voting, is that it always uses a paper ballot.

Not having a paper trail, is strongly being pushed by one party.

Where I vote, the machine prints out a paper ballot which is then scanned and counted before I leave.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

you also claimed to be a nurse then asked really basic questions about medicine

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

I've always been offered one, usually as the default.

My state is paper ballots and a tabulator that just counts the bubbles for each candidate, so everyone gets one. They have a computer based option for accessibility, but I believe that also prints ballots.

boils down to it depends.

in my area, particularly we have paper ballots that then get read by the digital machines, so if there's any type of question about the legitimacy of it, there's the paper trail to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M

Where I vote machines aren't allowed to be used in voting at all.

I'm sure it depends where you are. I'm in Canada, where Federal and Provincial elections are paper only, which makes my paranoid coder heart very happy. You get a piece of paper with a names on it and you put an X next to the one you want to vote for.

Where I vote, you plop your government-issued smartcard in your PC and cryptographically sign your vote. Of course, this raises a privacy concern.

It should ideally be impossible to determine who you voted for, or if you did, while still allowing you to verify your vote got counted. Last I checked, this was an active (and super interesting) area of research in cryptography.

We have paper ballots that get scanned by a machine for the count. That way there is always a paper ballot that can be hand counted if the machine count is ever in question.