Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

How are you going to implement managed democracy?

Each voting district sets its own methods; different areas have different laws. It's a mess.

They switched to machines to that

1. Its easier to create conspiracy theories about "stolen election" even when there isn't.

2. If you now rig the election, the losing side (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!

It's gotta be a distraction from gerrymandering and other more provable fuckery

100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.

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

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.

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.

We did it cause money. And lobbying. Same thing.

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.

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.