Some Tennessee voters say they touched one candidate’s name on a voting machine but saw a different name selected. State election officials say unintended touches can cause that to happen.
  • QuiteQuickQum@lemmy.world
    31·
    4 hours ago

    TN voter here. The poll workers are aware and on point. I was given a warning delivered in a very neutral tone. “Because there are so many options and the options are narrow some people have been noticing when they try to select an option it chooses the one above. Make sure the tip of your finger touches the candidate you are choosing. Double check the candidate you want is selected as a grayed box. Triple check the candidate you chose is showing on the review page. Quadruple check the candidate you chose is printed on the slip before feeding it into the counting machine. Come to us if the printed slip does not show the candidate you chose and we’ll spoil it and reset your vote.” Poll workers are heros.

    • DrPop@lemmy.world
      2·
      36 minutes ago

      I tried looking to see if you can request a paper ballot in Tennessee but keep getting results for absentee ballots. Are you not allowed to request a paper one?

  • la508@lemmy.world
    19·
    7 hours ago

    I have two questions about this:

    1. 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.

    2. What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!? Just speak normally.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      50 minutes ago

      If you’ve ever had to grade a scantron test, you would know how hard “fill in the little circle completely, and only fill in one circle per question” is for the general population.

    • DrPop@lemmy.world
      1·
      34 minutes ago

      Not all states use voting machines, it’s a state by state thing. The news voice I think is something they are trained in. It might be a holdover from the radio days and the “trans-atlantic” accent.

    • pixelmeow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      That “news reporter” voice has gotten steadily worse over the years. I stopped watching news of any kind a long time ago partially because of how annoying that voice and cadence was. Every time I see any news reporting now it’s all I can do not to take to the TV (or whatever) with a baseball bat. I can’t take it seriously at all and it’s so SO much worse now.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    7 hours ago

    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:

    The ownership and management of the companies that make these things is also very worth exploring:

    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.