271 Comments

That's how it was done in my county for decades. But then they switched to electronic touch-screen voting machines. I think it is easy to make a mistake on those machines.

And of course nobody in the Voter Registration office is computer literate, so it is all handled by an outside IT firm they have a contract with. I doubt anyone in the County understands the ins-and-outs of computer security, they have to trust what the contractor tells them.

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The districts I've voted in went back to paper ballots years ago. Sure it costs money, but that means someone's making money. (Probably someone who's friends with the lawmakers, but whatever.) The ballots are scanned as you turn them in, and then stored. They are only handled if analysis of the scanned date raises a red flag. I'm in IT and I think this is a good way to go. Redundancy.

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It's catching on outside the nerd circles now.

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That is misdirection. The problem with the paperless voting machines is no human verifiable audit trail. The machines themselves are not high value targets, but the sheer laziness and cheapness of the manufacturers and regulators not putting in a human verifiable audit trail is a big issue. There is no way to validate how the votes were cast.One setup, no longer authorized, had WiFi (WEP) between the machines and a sa/<blank> SQL table for recording the the votes with no transaction logging on it. They literally had no way to tell if someone had changed the vote record on the database.All voting systems can be compromised, but it is harder to print and stuff ballot boxes with the correct number of ballots and secretly get them to the right place than it is to remotely execute a few lines of SQL and then drop the logs. When anyone with eyes can see the cheating rather than only a forensic IT investigator it does actually provide protection.

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Sounds just like my experience running an Australian Polling Booth too.Admittedly the most ballot papers we ever had was 3 because of a Referendum. As I understand it at some US elections there could be 25+.

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The ";" seems to be an artifact generated whenever an ampersand is used in front of a capital letter in an html post. You can see the same thing in 5$F's post on Mannifort. I don't know enough about it to know if it's caused by the browser or OS or what, though.

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We don't have early voting in NY, and we don't vote by mail (except for absentee ballots). Still, we fill out ovals on a PAPER ballot, and that gets scanned by the vote-counting machines. Any problem? Count the paper ballots by hand.

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Oh, to return to the era of the hanging chad.

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Paper ballots, motherfucker!

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Hah! Im sure the contracts for machines arent any great savings in actual dollars or may even cost more! Remember these companies have often been owned by the friends/family/drinking buddy/soninlaw etc of congress critters or other local representatives.

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On their web site, they just refer to themselves as ES&S without the semicolon.https://www.essvote.com

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I would love to see that schweinhundt(?!) get his ass kicked in this election. GOTV!!!

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Oh, it's only the software that COUNTS the votes. I'm so relieved.

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I agree.

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Was wondering that myself.

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Agreed.

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