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.
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That’s a really cool reply. Thanks for sharing!
I think the lawsuits throwing out mail in ballots for blue counties were far more harmful than “voting machine fraud”
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing
I’m guessing you’re a Canadian that was using voice-to-text with your device’s language set to “US English”.
In American English, “writing” and “riding” sound the same. But not in Canadian English. Or British English, but for a different reason.
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.
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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.
