Authorities are quite interested in a voting machine that showed up at Goodwill and later was sold on eBay

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Originally published at: Authorities are quite interested in a voting machine that showed up at Goodwill and later was sold on eBay | Boing Boing

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Hot take: any voting machine that counts votes based on bar codes is hot garbage.

The ballot marking devices (BMDs)? They show your choices in plain text (good); but they tally votes based on a bar code you can’t read (bad). Take it away, Jennifer Cohn, who’s been warning about these machines for YEARS:

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Naturally, authorities in Michigan, from where the voting machine was sourced, are trying to figure out what the heck is going on here.

One might hope that every machine has a serial number etched on it which can provide an audit trail as to where it originated. If that serial number has been removed, that alone indicates potentially criminal shenanigans somewhere.

And if they can’t swiftly identify the current location of every serial-numbered machine (and identify which serial numbers are unaccounted for) then something is rotten in the state of…

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Especially since we’ve been using (human-readable) Scantron forms for standardized tests for a half century now.

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No aspect of voting security should ever depend on secrecy or proprietary information/technology, so this machine being available on the open market shouldn’t be any more of a security risk than if an old-school manual paper ballot punching/marking machine was up for sale, but we all know that a bunch of states bought into garbage forms of voting technology.

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It’s just so mind-boggling that anyone even went through the trouble to invent insecure, garbage forms of voting technology since we already had perfectly functional ballot-tallying technology for generations.

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THIS! THIS!

We already HAD the tech we needed! And it provided an easily-audited paper trail!

The BMDs are such a needless complication…

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Too bad LGR didn’t get it on goodwill, we could be seeing him playing duke3d on it now

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