That face when even with rigging the machines they still loose.
Hell yeah, but also you can lose that “o”
Sow doubt and suspicion. Claim fraud, steal election. Martial law the riots, fascism.
Flubbed executions, panic banning Kratom over Facebook posts, broken voting systems. Tennessee is the new Mississippi.
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.
So what makes this better than a pencil mark on paper?
Pretty sure they solved this problem back in the 1960s with a pen that can be used on a screen.
The general public would have forgotten how to use this highly advanced equipment by now, sometime after the first few iPhones. :( :(
Such things are FoR TeChNiCaL pEoPLe now.
(Sorta satirical, mostly genuinely sad.)
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?
The machine prints a paper ballot, which you then feed into a counting machine. The voting machine itself doesn’t actually store any of your votes after you have sent your selections to the printer. This allows them to preserve a hard copy for recounts, and also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections before they feed it into the counting machine.
do you know why they don’t just print the ballot and put a big circle for somebody to mark with a sharpie?
seems to work great up here in Canada… very straightforward experience
That honestly sounds more like fucked up screen calibration than anything. If the machines are old as fuck, they likely still need that. People forget how shitty touchscreen tech used to be.
When it comes to republican election fuckery there are no coincidences.
This happened a few elections ago. Always favored Republicans for some reason.
There are other ways to mess with the counts that aren’t going to be visible to the person as they make selections. Like having it show whatever they’re selecting properly, then just printing different selections at the end. Not everyone is going to verify the printed copy shows what they selected, and already confirmed on the machine once.
Making it jump around on screen isn’t discreet at all, and it’s not the easiest way to try and interfere. Poorly calibrated touchscreens, and a user interface with inadequate spacing between options are much more likely reasons.
We’re used to using devices that companies spend a lot of time designing the User Experience on. Voting machines are a very niche industry, with virtually no consumer backlash for a shitty experience because the voter has no direct control, and the government isn’t going to be using that interface to handle things like counts at the end.
I think the MAGAs are at the point where they don’t care if they are discrete because they know there will be no consequences for their corruption. News outlets will forget about it after a day, if they even report it. Democrats will send a strongly worded letter and forget about it. If any part of the justice system that still has integrity (increasingly rare) gets involved, Trump will just pardon them. The People might hold a protest or two, but they won’t do anything that actually threatens power.
I have two questions about this:
-
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.
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What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!? Just speak normally.
What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!?
RIGHT?! It’s quite bizarre. Maybe it’s some kind of standard for maximum clarity or something. It annoys me too, just like “commercial voice.”
We do it correctly in Washington State. We get our ballot in the mail, mark it at home, and stick it in a mail box or ballot drop box. It’s amazing, and I remember being baffled when I learned voting in person wasn’t obsolete.
With no ID checks?
You need a valid state ID or SSN to register. Can register online, by mail or in person.
If you get an EDL you are automatically registered.
Easy peasy.
America, more than ever, varies a lot by state.
I’m from New England. I vote in person because it’s fast and easy. In my urban town, everyone lives within a 5-10 minute walk of their polling location. There is never a line and it takes like 2 minutes tops. It’s a paper ballot, fill-in-the-bubble style. I had to vote absentee once: I swung through town hall and took care of it in like 15 minutes - same deal except it went in a signed and sealed envelope.
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.
Eh. Big difference in motivation between high schoolers taking a test and adults voting. Also, the circles on the ballots are larger and spaced farther apart.
it seems to work just fine here in Canada
In many countries automated counting is not a thing. All interested parties gather in a room and manually count it.
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.
1 - so someone could make money off selling them
2 - probably thanks to radio news and a stylistic choice that took hold
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.
It’s getting right up there with “Hurried excited yet clear but stress-inducing YouTube-bro you’ve got to see this you won’t believe it” voice. ARGHH.
Because that voice and cadence is how you know that I’m telling the truth…and am REALLY important. BruisedMoose, piefed.social. Back to you la508.
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In Canada we don’t even use machines. Just mark an X and count the papers you rubes.
The funny part is these voting machines actually just send your selections to a printer, which creates a hard copy with the corresponding bubbles filled in next to your selected names.
Then you feed that printed ballot into a counting machine. And the counting machine is just a fancy scantron reader. The point of the printer is that it creates a hard copy which can be counted by hand for recounts. It also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections (and ask a poll worker to invalidate their vote and let them start over if anything is incorrect) before they actually feed it into the counting machine.
Literally. Elections is the one thing I don’t trust with digitalisation.
Just the one?
No, more. I wouldn’t have nuclear codes digital either. I wouldn’t want ChatGPT to get ahold of them and make a whoopsie with a “You right, I did a mistake there eradicating Angola. Here’s what happened.”
Sigh, the simpler days of hanging chads…
Which was also stupidly complex. Just mark a fucking x
Complex because they were stealing an election.
Aww shoot. This X is next to the name, not the circle.
This person made an x, then lined out the name and put an X on another candidate.
This X is actually just a /
Add a photograph to the mix for 8x mult.
And if one photograph or chad isn’t enough, hire a showman to take another one for you. Number go up.
Same in civilized states in the US. Mark by hand, counted by machine, and recounted by hand if necessary.
This bug will get fixed before the election. It’s supposed to flip to the GOP candidate AFTER the submit button is pressed and without the voters knowledge.
or when the paper ballot somehow is either missing or not counted.
Funny how it never flips for Dems.
See, that’s pure coincidence and has nothing to do with manipulation. But if it would flip for the Dems, then it would be 100% Biden’s fault. Who is probably not even American, but from Ghana. And has very poor approval ratings.
Voting machines are FORCING people to Vote for Republicans DESPITE what they ACTUALLY Pressed? Sounds like TRANSGENDERS and MEXICAN KIDS are commiting VOTER Fraud!
-LITERALLY Republicans!
Lol
huh
That went over your head huh? Pretty damn funny
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:- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-1
- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-2
- https://news.engin.umich.edu/2024/10/four-election-vulnerabilities-uncovered-by-a-michigan-engineer/
- https://cssh.northeastern.edu/2024-election-results-under-scrutiny-as-lawsuit-advances/
The ownership and management of the companies that make these things is also very worth exploring:
- https://www.wired.com/story/scott-leiendecker-dominion-liberty-votes/
- https://apnews.com/article/cbc30e6a059a41ff8ba4d4da2f120f79
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.
To me, this reads as a software bug.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
Electronic voting is extremely scary to me because it is a black box that collects and counts the votes.
It would be trivial to display everything properly, but record a different result in the background, or simply at the end change a number of votes to make a faked result seem belivable.
Note however that I have no proof of that happening and I am not claiming that any voting machine is actually doing this. I am simply explaining what I believe is a possible danger of using computerized voting.
I don’t think they care about being obvious anymore. They know no one will do anything about it.
Fair point, by making it obvious you also demonstrate your power.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
I’mma stop you right there.
Even just the information that the media gets to share with us illustrates pretty clearly that this administration and entire political movement behind it is a mix of violent idiots and slightly more self aware mustache-twirling villains who delight in taunting and torturing their victims once they are confident they’ve won.
And it’s not just sadistic sickness, it’s also a strategy. If the evening news shows government officials knowingly doing illegal and reprehensible things on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, while also reminding us that the police state is in full effect for everybody else, they think they are sending a message to regular folks that they cannot be touched and you’d best just keep your head down and not get any funny ideas. It’s literally just the Death Star “fear will keep them in line” strategy.
But at least the retort about a tighter grip meaning more systems/groups slip through their fingers is also accurate.
Fascism is not a good long term plan because it is rooted in selfish, short term goals of the few.
That is why there is usually a printed paper ballot that goes along with it. That allows you to verify your vote was cast properly, and allows for recounts and audits if the electronic count is questioned.
That is a good first step, but removes one critical function of an election, secrecy.
You need voter secrecy to avoid voting coercion by a third party, that only works if they can find out what you actually voted for.
The printed ballot shouldn’t be tied to you. It prints out of the machine when you vote. You check that it is accurate, then drop it in a box. Secrecy is maintained, an auditabke paper trail exists, and as long as chain of custody for the ballots is maintained it should remain accurate.
Though with so many organizations being coopted by fascists, and independent election observers are being denied, there is a lot of room for fuckery.
Unless people lie about the ballot. Or they are thrown out. I’m sure there’s a digital version of hanging chads.
Bitflips
There is! It’s a joker in the hit indie game Balatro.
Yeah because we know after the votes are picked up, there* definitely won’t be any paper ballots missing or wrongly counted. You people are in la la land.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
Ok, so the point of the machine is to generate a ballot?
Seems like it would be easier to just skip the machine…
Nah, you do both. A fast electronic count then a slow paper count. That way you get the advantages of both systems.
The machine allows a digital recording that can be tabulated faster than physically counting the paper ballots.
The paper ballots should still be the official votes and counts, but the machine means faster preliminary results.
Digital-only voting is an issue because there is no backup paper trail, and could easily be compromised without any visible indication.
There is no reason for the voting machine to know a name or display anything identifying. You should be verified separately before getting close to a machine to vote. It should be as dumb as possible. Only tabulating your selections and printing the result for you to verify then drop into the official box.
Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.
I’m amazed at the American obsession with voting machines. A properly organised hand count has an amazingly low error rate. I distinctly remember an article about 20 years ago stating, that even the then newest scanning vote counting machines had an error rate higher than hand counting.
Yes “a human” makes mistakes. But multiple humans paying attention at the same time and also keeping each other honest do a tremendously good job.
that is why conservative depend on the mahcines, they are known to have an error rate that somehow only benefits republicans.
There are other types of paper ballots.
Here in Sweden you take a ballot from the party you want to vote for, you mark any specific representative if you want, you put the ballot in an envelope, seal it, walk to the election official desk and cast your vote:
I’m reasonably sure that the “hanging chads” was only a problem for counting votes for candidates from one of the two parties.
I’ve heard a legend that in a Scottish parliament election, which claims that a ballot is required only to show “clear preference” that a person drew dicks on all but one candidate, over which was written “not a dick”. The vote was counted as it showed clear preference.
The point is, people determined on a particular outcome will find novel ways of ensuring that outcome.
Eh. The entire state of Oregon gets by just fine without absolute ballot secrecy. And any other state that largely or to a significant degree exercises no-excuse vote-by-mail. Basically everyone in Oregon votes by mail. There are in-person voting booths at each county election office for the few oddballs that want to vote in person, but almost everyone votes by mail. It’s October 22. My ballot is already in. I’ve already voted. I filled out my ballot in my kitchen.
There was nothing physically preventing someone from forcing me to fill out my ballot the way they want to. There would be nothing physically preventing my employer from saying, “fill out your ballot the way you want in front of me, sign it, and then give it to be to turn in. If your refuse or cancel your ballot later, you’re fired.”
Yet that doesn’t happen. Why? Because we made it a serious fucking crime to do that. If I’m reading Oregon law right (I’m no lawyer), coercion of a vote that way would be a class C felony punishable for up to five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. And I’m less sure on this part, but I imagine that would apply to every single employee you coerced this way. So you’re risking a felony for ever single vote your coerce. That’s a huge risk for a single vote. It’s just not worth it. Some real morons might try it, but no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to give it a try. Plus any federal penalties.
apply to every single employee you coerced this way.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually considered the risk that an employer could force people to vote a certain way. I’m far more concerned about people living in abusive relationships.
we made it a serious fucking crime to do that.
People living in abusive relationship are already victims of serious crimes every day. Yet those crimes often go unreported for years, because the fear and control is so strong. I see no reason to believe that someone who is already controlling their partner with physical violence would balk at forcing them to fill out a vote a certain way before mailing it for them.
And yet it doesn’t happen. Could an abusive spouse do this? Sure. But again, it’s a huge risk for not a lot of gain. It’s one extra vote in exchange for a felony. It’s just not a serious problem the way domestic violence in general is.
You have to balance competing interests in law. Mail voting makes voting much more accessible, cheaper, and more resilient to manipulation such as closing poll locations in targeted precincts. And stretching election day over a few weeks gives people a chance to more easily correct errors that pop up, and makes the voter rolls more resilient to political ratfucking.
That huge increase in accessibility does come with a slightly increased risk of vote coercisiom, but it’s more than worth it.
We should be concerned about any sort of coercive control. Yes, children, elders, elders, and other vulnerable populations may need to be prevented from skipping proper nutrition, hydration, hygiene, and shelter, force and coercive control need delicate handling, where practical and possible. For instance, while proper nutrition is a noble goal and the sweeteners, oils and other questionable ingredients in a nutrition beverage may give us pause, that’s still preferable to ng tubes or force feeding.
I’m not an electioneering expert or anything, but I’ve often thought that one way to get the best of both worlds would be to generate a unique one-way hash of a voter’s vote choices and essentially a private key (not 4). The hash could be publicly displayed to verify the final counts without revealing anything about the person behind the votes. The list of hashes for a candidate could be counted by everyone and anyone could verify that their hashes were listed under the correct candidates.
Then there is still the potential for an abusive partner or parent to get your hash and verify what you voted for.
An election is actually very complex to run while maintaining anonymity, security and transparency at the same time.
Not only that, it makes selling your vote actually feasible, since you have an easy way to prove who you voted for.
TBF, it’s legal to take a picture of your ballot now, so you can sell your vote in other ways.
No way to confirm the ballot you took a picture of is the one that went in the box though.
I don’t know how you’d come to this conclusion living in the world we live in today.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the right
