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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Pen and paper works pretty well. Everyone who can read/write/count understand how it works and can be appointed as a political/citizen observer.
Moreover, if the count is public (not in the US but it’s the case where I vote) everyone can see the counting and get the number, all it takes is people having 2h to give to their country to help counting or just watch it.
This make fraud almost impossible
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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.
100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult. In France voting is done entirely on paper and results are often released later that night, and almost all the results are in by the next day. Same in the UK, although it generally takes them a few hours longer, probably because the polls close later in the evening.
In California we’re all mailed paper ballots, which we can return by mail (no stamp needed) or designated ballot box, or in person at a polling place up to closing time on Voting Day. My ballot (in a westside Los Angeles district) had 37 items, (on about 7 pages iirc) some of which were yes/no on propositions, others of which had a choice between 2 to 15 candidates for various offices. From school board to US President. It was very clear, just needed a black pen to fill the circles, and I could have gotten it in a dozen different languages. It’s also accessible for my quadriplegic husband, who can’t get to a polling place. But it took time and thought. It wasn’t like the pictures I’ve seen of French ballots which were just a single name on a sheet of paper, take the one from the stack of your choice, I guess? So counting them takes more time. Plus counting ballots that were mailed and postmarked by the deadline, those are allowed 2 weeks to arrive.
*(A couple of edits to clarify details)
I heard Ireland does too, but they also use Rank Voice Voting so it takes them about a week. Seems like a potential benefit that the process of democracy is so visible, imo.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones. No way one of the USPS employees, or a corrupt election worker, clerk, etc. would ever do anything wrong. If anything, our recent elections have shown us really people are infallible & honest, and it is computers that are inherently flawed.
It’s far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it’s all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it’s managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.
Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you’d need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you’d need them all to keep their mouths shut. That’s far more difficult than defeating a computerised system
It’s actually much easier, especially with mail-in ballots. Paper ballots can discarded, modified, etc. Many of them sit in election boxes that aren’t under reliable surveillance. The election workers, usually only two, come and put them into giant trash bags. They are not monitored at that point either, allowing them to modify the ballots. I haven’t seen any reliable checks of the envelopes at that point either, where if they’re opened & resealed, it wouldn’t even raise flags. You also have no way to confirm the tally of your vote to ensure it wasn’t manipulated. If you want to have multiple checks with multiple isolated computer systems, you absolutely can.
I for one, actually believe a blockchain ledger system of voting like that of Monero would provide a great option. Most of all, they could anonymously verify their vote which to me is the most important. Having some verification that my vote was actually calculated as casted is extremely important to me. Furthermore, you’d have top academics, mathematicians, cryptographers providing the exact details on its design with an open source solution that anyone could search & scan for vulnerabilities, meaning it would receive a significant amount of review & testing.
You also would have a huge amount of people like myself that actually understand the tech, and plenty of individuals willing to explain its design & safety in a format comfortable for you. It is a shame people are so opposed to new ideas & real progress, especially after Democrats just lost to Trump. I guess just keep what you’re doing & we’ll finally get a viable third party.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones
Correct. It is. Because to do enough to change the result you need to do it alot, and that’s really hard to get away with.
In Canada we count the ballots with witnesses (called scutineers) to validate.
