I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
My voting location has paper ballots counted by scanners (it’s not practical or accurate/reliable to count that number of ballots by human hand).
If there’s a question, just rescan the ballots. Nothing’s perfect, but this (IMHO) is about as good as it gets.
The only change I would make is to have ranked choice voting.
paper ballots
Just FYI, I think most, or at least every voting machine I’ve used in GA, actually prints a paper ballot that then is read by a machine (or maybe a human, not entirely sure).
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re immune to some sort of foul play. I always triple check my choices and triple check the printed ballot. But is there some sort of nefarious trickery in some machine readable only part of it? Perhaps. I personally don’t think there is, but who knows. I’d love to be proved wrong. I’d love to see the fascists suffer.
To be 100% clear, I don’t think there isn’t foul play going on, I’m just skeptical that it’s specifically in the voting/counting machines, but I haven’t also read up on the most recent of claims from the past few weeks about it.
GOP can use actors, like russia and now elon to change/hack the machines to vote in thier favor. this is more prevelant in red areas than blue ones. Remember mitch mcconnels last election, he had the same exact situation, more people voted blue in those areas, but somehow the votes still went to mitch.
1st off, “The US” didn’t, individual Counties did. 2nd there are several different companies that offer different machines and methodologies, all that need to conform to various Federal, State, and County laws. 3rd all devices, digital and analog need to pass a strick verification process carried out by one of two companies run at the behest of the USG.
If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match. Only the verified source code compilation is used in an election, verified before and after the election. This is for every-single-device workstation and server.
All tabulation, adjudication and verification systems are on an airgapped network, and ALL CAT cabling must be visible, usually above your head in open racks. All servers and stations must also be visible as well, servers usually secured behind bulletproof glass enclosures. All USB ports are disabled under a locked BIOS and physically blocked/locked as well. Everything is way passed triple checked.
NO ONE works by themselves. Election officials work in groups of two or four, eight, and more for volunteers. Everything and everyone is on camera except for the restrooms, but approach and egress are on camera. Different sized counties have different budgets, so setups vary, but all must conform to all the laws from every level.
Vote By Mail ballots are constricted in a way so that they are layered, are all opened in a single room, under Elections Officials supervision and definitely on camera. A dozen to several dozen people would IMMEDIATELY know if you are tampering with a ballot, it would be that obvious.
Some small counties count by hand, while large counties can use high-speed industrial scanners such as IBML to feed the ballots to the Tabulation Server.
Then you have specialized hardware such as a Voting Machine, and Definitely Abled Voting machines, with the ability for a Caretaker to assist without revealing the Assisted’s ballot casts.
All of these go through a highly vetted verification process that must be signed off on by all stakeholders. All are verified before and after.
Most (I say this because I am not 100% sure) have a physical papertrail that must be stored along with the digital results for however many years the State and Counties laws call for.
In most counties you are able to go down to the Elections office to get a verification copy of YOUR ballot if you fear you have been exploited, within the timeframe the law allows for cast ballot storage.
The shortest timeframe that I know of for cast ballot storage is two years, the longest I know of is ten.
I’ve probably missed a couple salient points but I think you get the drift.
Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine. The people working your elections are dedicated professionals. “Don’t care who you vote for, just care that you vote”
However a zero vote count for the Dog Catcher would be highly suspicious, let alone a presidential run.
Source: I’ve built and secured elections.
Unironically, I think elections are one of the few scenarios where blockchain technology could actually be useful.
A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that’s not even the main problem.
If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.
It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn’t even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.
A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we’re talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.
And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they’ll never get the access to verify it themselves.
Even checking a ballot print isn’t foolproof. In a secret ballot system there’s nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.
Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine.
Stealing an election doesn’t have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.
As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That’s just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.
I think the lawsuits throwing out mail in ballots for blue counties were far more harmful than “voting machine fraud”
That’s a really cool reply. Thanks for sharing!
They switched to machines to that
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Its easier to create conspiracy theories about “stolen election” even when there isn’t.
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If you now rig the election, the losing (who legitimately won before) will seem like conspiracy theorists for claiming fraud, even if the election was indeed stolen.
Congrats, the people are now fighting each other while the rich can use the ensuing violence as a pretense to enact more authoritarian laws!
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Remember the hanging Chad fiasco? After that Congress appropriated money for a digital solution, but did literally no work to standardize or ensure ethics. So a bunch of shit companies bid bottom dollar and got the contracts.
This is because elections happen at the county level. You would know that if you voted.
Wrong post, but you should be nicer.
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How are you going to implement managed democracy?
There’s also a difference, because our elections typically have only a few races on them. In other words, at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing. Typically four to six options.
In a us election, there can be a ballot containing choices for many different levels, including judges, district attorneys, and so on. Not to mention they might have several referenda on the same ballot too.
I could see that being much more complex on paper, making electronic voting attractive.
Still that’s a solved problem. You just use different color coded papers for each item that has to be voted on.
I really don’t get the US’s difficulties with paper votes. It’s so easy to understand literal preschoolers can understand it. I know because our children voted on meal choices in preschool every time an election happened in Germany.
It’s super transparent. You can just watch the counts or even count them yourself if you doubt them.
It’s fast. If you have enough voting districts counting takes an hour or two. Maybe a few more if you have a big district with many different issues to vote on.
Almost everyone can understand how it works. Even many literally mentally disabled people. I find this to be the most compelling argument for paper voting. You leave noone behind. It’s a super simple concept to grasp that reaches every citizen. But with electronic voting you need to have a degree in computer science to understand that it is not transparent at all what is happening inside the machine.
We did it cause money. And lobbying. Same thing.
That’s just not true. No one is lobbying counties to change their ballot systems, it’s decided by a county referendum vote, then the county seeks out the companies and reviews they systems they have to offer. Then the counties Election offices speak with other counties to review how they implemented said system, usually with an exchange of personnel and several onsite visits, and observers during an actual election.
Only after many reviews, meetings, etc etc does a county move forward with a particular company and it’s offerings.
I remember my country using such machines for some elections before they were considered as incompatible with democracy. We vote on paper again, which is good.
Same here, we’re still voting on paper, and I hope that never changes without good reason.
I’ve honestly liked the systems we have in our county. They’re a digital system but you feed in a straight sheet and it reads your district. From there you select on a touch screen all of your selections and then print it out. You have a chance to review the ballot at that point to make sure everything is printed out right. You then slide it into another scanner which counts the votes and drops the ballot into a secured box, that way should they need to audit things you have a paper trail too.
It’s gotta be a distraction from gerrymandering and other more provable fuckery
Yes. Exactly. Votes are counted accurately, and then carefully grouped (gerrymandered) to prevent public opinion from influencing the planned election outcome.
Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.
What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is
that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states
there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.
when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.
the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community
there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout
A lot of voting systems changed after the 2000 election. States should have adopted the paper ballot with optional scanning, but a lot of states didn’t for various reasons.
I guess it varies by jurisdiction. In my state we fill out paper ballots, then you just insert the ballot into a machine which records your votes and prints you a receipt.
