109
‘Mischief and problems’: rightwing activists ramp up drive to hand-count ballots
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
109 points (97.4% liked)
politics
19221 readers
2442 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Theoretically, electronic polling should generate a near instand result with no counting errors. How many legal documents can you file online nowadays? There never seems to be an issue with those "getting lost" or "duplicated." I think back to a USA election a few years ago where boxes of ballots were recounted several times until the supreme Court declared a winner. Votes stored in a secure database wouldn't just "get lost" or "get miscounted."
Theoretically, but in actuality the software is written by incompetent companies and there's a much higher potential to interfere maliciously.
Hand counting our elections is worth the effort... even if this particular push is a disingenuous effort to muddy the election results. This is a "broken clock is right twice a day" situation.
Not necessarily true. Sure code is easy to mess up, source I work as a software engineer, but it's also easy to proofread. An open source government sponsored vote counting software could easily be implemented. Heck the data base without personal identifying information could be made public for people to compare results on local builds of the software.
As a fellow software engineer, please realize that open SSH is used by pretty much everyone and had several severe security issues for decades. Open source software is much more secure than closed source but if the pool of people reviewing the software in detail is small and the stakes are high then it'll be much cheaper for a foreign actor to expend 10 million per person for bribery or blackmail for a few dozen people then trying to infiltrate hundreds of municipalities.
I make software, I've been in this industry for decades and it's awesome - this isn't a problem space where it's a good solution.
Voting machines seem like a solution in search of a problem. Yes. We can do it, maybe we can even do it well. But that doesn't make it better than paper ballots.
Few legal documents have the anonymity requirements of ballots.
The problem is that voters need to trust all of the devices between the voter, the database, and the person who declares the winner. With software, that's hard. How do you convince Jane Public that the iPad is reporting accurately across some Verizon network to the IBM Db2 instance which is telling the truth to the state election official? Even when it's working perfectly, it's opaque to most people.
The great thing about paper ballots is that representatives of all interested parties can watch the whole thing and audit the results. Representatives of each candidate are present at the ballot counting, and they forward the counts to the campaign HQ. It's easy to watch and explain.
I'm not sure how an electronic system can provide that level of openness.
It shouldn't be too hard to have two separate databases. One with personal identifying info attached and one without. It could even allow voters to look up their vote later if they wanted to confirm how it was cast. The database without identifying info could be made public so people could compare results on their own vote counting software.
There's always a relevant xkcd:
How many people who are pissed with the results might claim an alternate cast vote later on just to bring the machines into question? It wouldn't take many to do this to create a fair amount of distrust.
Opposed too now? People already claim the votes are counted wrong.
Perception. People trust a vote that is more transparent and completed by two independent people.
Personally I trust the electronic one entirely but I could see it a bug occurring that puts some future election results in question. Would you trust it if an AI wrote the program?