Don't have to bother with gerrymandering, or slick legal ways to arrest people for voting with the wrong documents. Or just good old fashioned intimidation, like making the polling place the police station or the ICE detention facility.
It's just a lot smoother process when you can simply write some software to manipulate the count.
Who's gonna check?
(No, seriously, Who's gonna check? Because you also need to layoff everyone in that department once you're in power.)
The problem is that once the counts are done and have been reported a lot of places then print those results out on paper and then scan those papers into a PDF for anyone who asks for a copy!
Since it's printed it is clearly already in a database somewhere. Why can't that just be made public too.
Seems bizarre to OCR printed documents (although I am aware of many companies doing this to parse invoices, etc.)
One key problem is that the US has tens of thousands of local governments, and each of them get to solve problems in their own way.
Digital literacy of the kind that understands why releasing a CSV file is more valuable than a PDF is rare enough that most of them won't have someone with that level of thinking in a decision making role.
simonw•3h ago
polskibus•1h ago
sitkack•1h ago