Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/09/jfc-kill-me-now.html
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Lying and incompetence on the part of voting machine makers?
Systems that are even more insecure than we already knew them to be?
(I wish I could be actually shocked by this.)
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imagine if the dems got an avalance of turnout in 2020, just unbelievable overwhelming every last unregistered voter came and voted
and trump somehow still wins
country will lose its mind
and that might be exactly what putin was hoping for, just like the brexit mess
ps. how secure is uk voting?
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Very. It’s all done with pencil and paper, no voting machines, all hand counted.
The biggest gap in the system is the minds of the voters. And I’m not allowed to do anything about that, unfortunately.
Edit- oh, and because someone else hasn’t got there already:
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As was just mentioned by purplecat, pretty secure.
The problem here is the hilariously undemocratic voting system used, not in how the votes are counted.
I can guarantee that my vote is being counted correctly, but in my area it’ll have approximately zero effect on the outcome…
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This just further proves for the millionth time that the people who run America are criminally negligent and criminally and negligently mindless driveling braindead morons.
It should be a crime to use or create a voting system that connects to the internet. For any reason.
Technology should be used for many things but national elections or even local elections hell no!
The slight extra amount of effort of counting paper ballots far under weighs the damage that can be caused by any tampering with a connected system for deciding how the most powerful country in the world decides its leaders.
GOP- you are the party of Russia unless you do something to fix this system but I already know you won’t do a damn thing
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Well, paper ballots have their problem, too…
I’d love a system where we can vote online, but there is one political party I no longer trust to play fair.
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Nonsense- Rhode Island’s 50 million votes are as safe as houses.
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I’m shocked. Shocked.
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Fear for the future. The last Ontario municipal election, it was a room of laptops in browsers, connected by WiFi. (Who knows what the back-end was, but it was a shitty web-app.) Different levels of government and election officials, but WTF?!
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Paper ballots over here are done this way: eight citizen volunteers hand out the ballots and count the ballots and report the results, for their slice of the voting district. The process is open, any concerned citizen may observe the process. The results are published on the district level, all newspapers carry theirs. The rest is just adding up.
Yes, even then there will people who mess with it, usually by exploiting letter votes in assisted living places or letter votes in general, but that’s usually limited to local elections.
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That’s only true if the outcome isn’t what they wanted, though… otherwise, everything being screwed up and incompetently implemented is “plausible deniability.”
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The other day on Pod Save America Tommy (I think) said something to the effect of:
Between conspiracy and incompetence, always bet on incompetence.
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I know the quote more along the lines of
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
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Not only that, but the paper votes are tagged with unique numbers and kept. Which means that your elected representative can check on your vote. Don’t go asking for help if you didn’t vote for them! 
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Really? Then there is something wrong with your electoral system beyond the use of paper ballots.
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Oh, and of course the justification for that gross abuse of anonymous voting is “to prevent electoral fraud.” Blegh. 
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Cool! Now even things not connected to the internet are connected to the internet.
Soon, I, too, will be connected to the internet, and it will be delicious and atrocious!
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