I have two questions about this:
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Why do Americans use these machines? Just turn up at the polling station, confirm your name and address, get handed your ballot paper, mark it with an X, drop it in the box. Bish bash bosh.
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What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!? Just speak normally.
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You know, it would be an extremely interesting and informative exercise to hook a few of these things up to
rea(augmented with a digital camera and some rudimentary physical automation) to get to the bottom of all the fucky shit these companies have been doing for decades, as well as doing some more robust and direct statistical analysis of the behavior of these machines:- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-1
- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-2
- https://news.engin.umich.edu/2024/10/four-election-vulnerabilities-uncovered-by-a-michigan-engineer/
- https://cssh.northeastern.edu/2024-election-results-under-scrutiny-as-lawsuit-advances/
The ownership and management of the companies that make these things is also very worth exploring:
- https://www.wired.com/story/scott-leiendecker-dominion-liberty-votes/
- https://apnews.com/article/cbc30e6a059a41ff8ba4d4da2f120f79
So, another route worth exploring (though this approach would require a lot more humans to get directly involved with social engineering and whitehat hacking) would be to basically get hired by these companies and find a way to exfiltrate data for the purpose of public viewing and analysis.
It’s furthermore worth noting that much of this could be answered if these companies open sourced the firmware and hardware specs of the systems they’re deploying, increasing public visibility and access in general (there are tons of VERY pervasively deployed and VERY secure pieces of software all over the world today - open source absolutely does not mean “insecure”, and in fact often leads to MORE secure software), but their ongoing insistence about being cloak and dagger about everything prevents any of that from happening.
In Canada we don’t even use machines. Just mark an X and count the papers you rubes.
Sigh, the simpler days of hanging chads…
Add a photograph to the mix for 8x mult.
Literally. Elections is the one thing I don’t trust with digitalisation.
Just the one?
Same in civilized states in the US. Mark by hand, counted by machine, and recounted by hand if necessary.
Voting machines are FORCING people to Vote for Republicans DESPITE what they ACTUALLY Pressed? Sounds like TRANSGENDERS and MEXICAN KIDS are commiting VOTER Fraud!
-LITERALLY Republicans!
Lol
This bug will get fixed before the election. It’s supposed to flip to the GOP candidate AFTER the submit button is pressed and without the voters knowledge.
or when the paper ballot somehow is either missing or not counted.
Funny how it never flips for Dems.
To me, this reads as a software bug.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
Electronic voting is extremely scary to me because it is a black box that collects and counts the votes.
It would be trivial to display everything properly, but record a different result in the background, or simply at the end change a number of votes to make a faked result seem belivable.
Note however that I have no proof of that happening and I am not claiming that any voting machine is actually doing this. I am simply explaining what I believe is a possible danger of using computerized voting.
That is why there is usually a printed paper ballot that goes along with it. That allows you to verify your vote was cast properly, and allows for recounts and audits if the electronic count is questioned.
That is a good first step, but removes one critical function of an election, secrecy.
You need voter secrecy to avoid voting coercion by a third party, that only works if they can find out what you actually voted for.
The printed ballot shouldn’t be tied to you. It prints out of the machine when you vote. You check that it is accurate, then drop it in a box. Secrecy is maintained, an auditabke paper trail exists, and as long as chain of custody for the ballots is maintained it should remain accurate.
Though with so many organizations being coopted by fascists, and independent election observers are being denied, there is a lot of room for fuckery.
Unless people lie about the ballot. Or they are thrown out. I’m sure there’s a digital version of hanging chads.
Eh. The entire state of Oregon gets by just fine without absolute ballot secrecy. And any other state that largely or to a significant degree exercises no-excuse vote-by-mail. Basically everyone in Oregon votes by mail. There are in-person voting booths at each county election office for the few oddballs that want to vote in person, but almost everyone votes by mail. It’s October 22. My ballot is already in. I’ve already voted. I filled out my ballot in my kitchen.
There was nothing physically preventing someone from forcing me to fill out my ballot the way they want to. There would be nothing physically preventing my employer from saying, “fill out your ballot the way you want in front of me, sign it, and then give it to be to turn in. If your refuse or cancel your ballot later, you’re fired.”
Yet that doesn’t happen. Why? Because we made it a serious fucking crime to do that. If I’m reading Oregon law right (I’m no lawyer), coercion of a vote that way would be a class C felony punishable for up to five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. And I’m less sure on this part, but I imagine that would apply to every single employee you coerced this way. So you’re risking a felony for ever single vote your coerce. That’s a huge risk for a single vote. It’s just not worth it. Some real morons might try it, but no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to give it a try. Plus any federal penalties.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
Ok, so the point of the machine is to generate a ballot?
Seems like it would be easier to just skip the machine…
Nah, you do both. A fast electronic count then a slow paper count. That way you get the advantages of both systems.
The machine allows a digital recording that can be tabulated faster than physically counting the paper ballots.
The paper ballots should still be the official votes and counts, but the machine means faster preliminary results.
Digital-only voting is an issue because there is no backup paper trail, and could easily be compromised without any visible indication.
There is no reason for the voting machine to know a name or display anything identifying. You should be verified separately before getting close to a machine to vote. It should be as dumb as possible. Only tabulating your selections and printing the result for you to verify then drop into the official box.
Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.
I’m amazed at the American obsession with voting machines. A properly organised hand count has an amazingly low error rate. I distinctly remember an article about 20 years ago stating, that even the then newest scanning vote counting machines had an error rate higher than hand counting.
Yes “a human” makes mistakes. But multiple humans paying attention at the same time and also keeping each other honest do a tremendously good job.
that is why conservative depend on the mahcines, they are known to have an error rate that somehow only benefits republicans.
There are other types of paper ballots.
Here in Sweden you take a ballot from the party you want to vote for, you mark any specific representative if you want, you put the ballot in an envelope, seal it, walk to the election official desk and cast your vote:
I’m not an electioneering expert or anything, but I’ve often thought that one way to get the best of both worlds would be to generate a unique one-way hash of a voter’s vote choices and essentially a private key (not 4). The hash could be publicly displayed to verify the final counts without revealing anything about the person behind the votes. The list of hashes for a candidate could be counted by everyone and anyone could verify that their hashes were listed under the correct candidates.
Then there is still the potential for an abusive partner or parent to get your hash and verify what you voted for.
An election is actually very complex to run while maintaining anonymity, security and transparency at the same time.
I don’t know how you’d come to this conclusion living in the world we live in today.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the right
