Voting machines don’t look that useful, and most of the time are just a way to make something that should be simple and straightforward more complicated. Great way to make money for voting machine companies tho.
Ethically, voting machine are in my opinion a bad thing, they are “black boxes” the average citizen can’t control or understand, a clear ballot box is yet the best option there is.
Here’s a nice video about why voting machines are trash :
I mean period. Machines are quite capable of tallying hand-marked ballots with great accuracy. We’ve been using Scantron-type technology to tally test scores since the 1970s.
I don’t advocate a system where we have to trust the machines to be accurate, I want a system where we can easily audit the ballots by hand if there’s even the slightest suspicion they might have been compromised.
How so? The pen-marked paper ballots I use to vote in California are incredibly straightforward to use, and don’t depend on subjective human judgement to try to figure out how I “meant” to vote like the myriad of bad ballot designs that plagued the 2000 election in Florida.
That doesn’t apply for machines like the Dominion ones, which, as stated many times now in various threads, just print out a paper ballot that the voter can verify before handing it in for counting.
Given the hanging chad problems of the 2000 election, and ongoing voter error with scantron-type ballots, it is reasonable to consider that type of machine a possible improvement.
I have no skin in this game, as my state uses scantron-type ballots for mail-in voting, but the irrational hatred for the paper ballot voting machines gets old. You’re paying for the technology on the front end or the backend if you are a voting district with a large number of voters.
I completely fail to see how machines can solve any problems more voting place or simple paper ballots can’t solve. You guys seems to really struggle about this every elections but it’s not that hard.
edit : You guys should really watch the video.
As I’ve said, “using simple paper ballots” and “using voting machines to tally results” are not mutually exclusive approaches.
Yeah sure, you can do that !
It’s pretty easy: with the scantron-type forms, you get a very small number of voter errors and essentially zero backend errors. With the Dominion machines, you largely eliminate those voter errors without introducing backend errors.
With hand counting human-readable ballots, there is human error on both the front end and the back end, and that error increases as you put more stress on the system with districts that have to process millions of votes in a short time.
We’re not talking about e-voting. I guess you just like errors?
While one can quickly applaud this kind of suit, it’s important to also note that suits like this are tarrifying to independent publications. Boing Boing has been on the other end of these sorts of actions, and if it weren’t for the actions of folks like the EFF, Boing Boing would likely no longer exist:
So, bear in mind that while it is nice to see these lawsuits wielded “properly”, they remain an existential threat to independent publishers and a major source of chilling speech. Because, it’s not about who’s right or wrong here - the question is - can you even afford to defend yourself in the first place?
This feels like a fundamentally different kind of action than what Playboy did to Boing Boing.
Boing Boing posted a link to copyrighted material uploaded by a third party. The Trump campaign and others repeatedly made patently false claims that are very likely to have a profound and lasting impact on Dominion Voting Systems’ business. Apples and oranges.
ESPECIALLY if it is hand marked paper ballots. I used to count these when I worked the polls. Voters make all kinds of illegible chicken scratches and confusing scribbles!!! Aaargh!
A suit with multiple defendants isn’t necessarily a class action suit. For a class action suit, you need many wronged claimants. It seems hard to demonstrate in a legal sense that a “class” was harmed.
Were that we could - care to advance a plausible legal claim? Cases for violation of civil rights via vote suppression certainly do have precedent, but are a tough fight.
I used that example because it went to trial. There have been so, so many others, many of which aren’t mentioned anywhere, but here’s an example:
The fact is, Boing Boing is continually and repeatedly dealing with these threats. Most of them involve wiping out articles from our archives, or otherwise memory-hole-ing things, but that’s mainly because the orgs threatening didn’t have deep pockets.
What happened to Gawker is only one pissed-off deep-pocket right-winger away from happening here, too. And it won’t matter if they’re right, it will matter if our friends can afford to be our shields again or not.
I get the fear of frivolous lawsuits against publishers, but Dominion Voting Systems’ claims are anything but frivolous. The outright lies circulated about their business operations and their machines have made the brand poison for any future U.S. elections. Their employees’ lives are in actual jeopardy. This is almost a case study in how civil suits should be used.
I mean that is the unfortunate way the legal system works and there should be more penalties for frivolous lawsuits. Big fish bullying the little fish is certainly one of the problems with our legal system.
But at the same time, not every lawsuit out there is frivolous and there are people making malicious attacks under the guise of free speech while eroding the confidence in America’s voting systems. Likewise if someone was saying BB was run by Reptilian Free Mason who want to turn the children of America in to nuggets and it was hurting the brand/site, I’d want you to be able to have legal recourse.
It’s like, I won’t cheer every time the cops arrest someone, but when they brought in the BTK killer, well, good.
I don’t disagree (in fact I said as much in my first sentence).
I don’t see any benefit for security or accuracy over counting by hand.
And I think that people participating in the democratic process by counting votes (over here that is done by volunteers, not officials) is building trust in the system.
Most people won’t be able to can’t trust a machine, because they wouldn’t understand how the machine might work.
Machines tend to be a lot faster and generally more accurate than humans when it comes to doing things like “counting.” By all means—keep the humans around to double-check the numbers whenever there’s any question about the process or the accuracy. But using humans as the only means of tallying the results doesn’t make any more sense than using humans to score every single answer on the SATs.
part of the argument for electronic voting is so that people who need assistance can still vote privately. being blind, not being able to mark a ballot, or not being an english speaker ( as a few examples ) are all impediments to voting, and electronic voting machines can help level that playing field.
my personal take is vote-by-mail scantrons with an in-person option to use a machine to help fill in the scantron is the way to go. best for everybody, easily auditable, very low barrier to voting.
I think Dominion is a dead man (corporation) walking. In a field like this, a reputation for impartiality is far more important than whether you are actually impartial.
I cannot see how Dominion will ever make another sale in the US, as any election authority who chooses them will be seen as actively attacking the (demented) beliefs of 25% of the electorate and it’s desperately important for election authorities to be seen as impartial…
Disclaimer: I’ve worked with Dominion when they really messed up (New Brunswick), and when they’ve helped run an incredibly smooth election (also New Brunswick, a few years later) and they’re a generally competent business. A real pity to see them destroyed as collateral damage to Trump’s desperation.
I hope they win enough to cover the next few years of lost sales and the cost of changing their name.
