given the money required it seems like it with always be one or the other that owns these? Maybe governments should own the machines (people would still complain)
disclosure, i am biased and think everyone should use paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".
Then hire 100x the number of poll workers as are needed in other countries. The cost is still trivial relative to the importance.
In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.
I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.
If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Yeah that's a nice thought, but it ignores a whole lot of recent evidence to the contrary.
If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.
In the absence of that, a one-party state is probably better than a two-party state in which one party is actively trying to burn the system down.
If you're pissing your pants in fear of people who fail to do something 200 nights in a row, I'd argue that says a lot more about you than it does them.
Can I say Singletons are not recommended but also agree that there are contexts where it's an "okay enough" option? Singetons are never the "best option" in modern software, but it's not the "worst" in every case either.
Now, filling your code base with incorrect calculations: pretty much always a bad idea.
After the wild amount of disproven claims made by republicans about election security, I don't trust them at all.
Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.
Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.
As for the reality, I can't say. I've not done the legwork to have an informed position.
Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.
Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.
I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)
Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.
Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.
I have been. What's next?
Hard to take this statement serious when all the headlines in this substack echo leftwing bias. At least be intellectually honest about your intent.
(I know that already might seem a lot to some people, but I was wondering if there was anything to justify the title beyond that.)
- vote marking machines (eg it marks a voter readable ballot that is the official record). You get fast preliminary results and improved voter accessibility but still have very high tamper resistance.
- risk limiting audits in all jurisdictions
> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
Given the context that the federal government is currently rounding up US persons and detaining or exiling them without due process, it’s a doubly asinine argument.
For 80% of people, national ID is a no brainer. The other 20% are the issue, and it's a problem that won't be solved in this framework of government in the US.
With specific relevance to voting, what happens to the exceptions? 1% of the US population is 3.5M people.
Birth certificate provenance and lack of procedure at birth is only one source of exception. Other examples:
- elderly people who lose access to records
- children whose parents fail to secure documents.
- non-custodial parents who refuse to provide documents to their children
- women whose names change from marriage/divorce
- native americans whose tribal papers
- minors who cannot get required identity documents because their social security card is lost and onerous to replace. (requires in-person appearance and takes 9-24 months)
Voting is a fundamental right. You can establish with high certainty the identity of a individual using easy to obtain proofs. The number of non-citizens voting illegally is a tiny number. This whole controversy is about suppressing the votes of the poor and infirm, as denying their rights has a clear ROI to one of the political parties.
Several states use Scantron, and a few jurisdictions (IIRC) still use punch ballot.
The state of Georgia uses these modern "digitally select, then print a ballot with QR code and legible names" ballots. They're great and feel optimal.
I understand why we don't do that - it would enable people to pay for votes with confidence, or to influence the votes of others via intimidation - but it would certainly make me feel better.
When they count your vote later, they have a high-speed system that can scan all the QR codes almost instantly. It's why we know the results in as little as an hour.
If there are any questions, or if the race is tight, a team of auditors can look at the ballot pages to check for any discrepancies. They'll check to make sure the machines themselves weren't tampered with by checking that the printed names and other ballot initiatives match the QR codes.
I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.
American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.
Simple, cheap, fast, and easy to audit.
I don't really see why this isn't the standard beyond very dense populations needing bigger election offices or ideally extended early voting.
The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:
- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).
- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.
- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.
This system feels perfect.
How do you ensure secret ballots when it's printing an opaque identifier (the QR code) on your ballot?
After the elections you sample the ballots to make sure they match. If you find any instances of error, that immediately raises red flags about the entire vote set.
In a close election, you comb over the results.
If such a scheme was ever discovered, it would make national news.
Combined with risk limiting audits you have a very strong system
There's no way to design a voting system that won't confuse some percentage of the population.
But when I said "scantron" it's not an actual scantron. The ballots look like this [1]
I don't really see how you could make that easier to fill out.
EDIT: Gah, they make it hard to create these links.
Click on district "1921" to see a sample ballot.
> You get fast preliminary results
A non-problem. Exit polls can do this if you really need it.
But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
I guess you "care about improving people's lives" by imagining a world where everything is awesome and pretending that it's real!
A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.
A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.
You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.
?? In NYS the main process for voting is voter marks their paper ballot and then scans the marked ballot into the “reader” (DS200). Optionally, there is a “marking” machine (Automark) which has accessibility features. But this machine only marks the ballot, and does not read. The marked ballot must still be scanned.
Are you proposing to eliminate the single scanner and have a new machine developed which marks and scans ballots?
If that’s the case, that would be incredibly expensive and greatly slow the voting process. I say this having worked at polls for 15 years.
Also, in the article—
> “…the SAVE Act got a lot of attention […] because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack.”
Some confusion in this, because while a passport may prove citizenship, it is not sufficient to prove eligibility to vote. Why? Because it doesn’t show your address, and eligibility from the Bureau of Elections standpoint is residency in an Assembly District/Election District. IE, you vote where you live because of local candidates and initiatives.
Ballot design has a big impact on self marked ballots. Most of the time it’s fine, but some times it fails badly and a significant number of voters fill it out wrong without knowing.
Second, for a small but significant fraction accessibility is an issue (visually impaired, language issues).
This approach is fairly standard and affordable
- voters have three chances to vote if they make a mistake, knowingly.
- the Automark helps with accessibility and independence, and you can ask a trusted friend/family member to assist.
As to voters choosing the wrong candidate unknowingly, I don’t see software/hardware changes the problem. Just as easy to made bad design choices here (imho they’re worse than paper).
As to affordability of hardware, that is not clear to me at all. The comparable costs of printed paper ballots and two machines (I think it’s per ED, or 750-1000 ppl in NY), versus 5-6+ units is not obvious.
And where are these marking machines “standard”?
The disabled and community has been very clear (reasonably) that hey deserve to vote on their own, without assistance
My contention has always been that until we see the basis of identity secured like Estonia/CAC/PIV/Passports through strong identity proofing and robust processes, we are not ready to talk about the Pandora’s box that is voting machines.
Votes are recorded by filling in the dots on a scantronic ballot form.
The form is scanned and the votes are tallied electronically.
The original paper ballot is archived, and can be re-scanned (or hand counted) if a recount is required.
This combines the best of both worlds: speed and accuracy of electronic tally, and the original hand-filled paper ballot is retained as a record.
Which means many companies can make the equipment/systems...
https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-certified-elect...
1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election. 2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.
Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.
My charitable interpretation of that is that they have a huge blindside for people who need to work crazy hours, look after kids, or for disabled people who need to do a lot of planning to get to a physical location they don't frequent. Or simply people out of town or country that day (soldiers on tour are a big one, my parents are rarely in town to vote). They are so distrusting of mail they forget that people can't all be expected to be in a single spot for a single day.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ovsta/frequently-requested-...
For example, LA uses Ballot Marking Devices.
(Mixed rating, according to Snopes.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1880/05/26/archives/imperialism.html
The state should be auditing them prior to using them to see that they work as expected.
1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.
Which is it?
Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).
What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/
[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...
This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.
I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.
At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.
It's a big reason I vote from home. Properly researching every candidate on a ballot can legitimately be a full day's work. Spreading that out to a week of iteration helps a lot.
I think you have that the wrong way around.
The benefit of hand counting is that it scales very poorly.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Making ballot counting more efficient is not important. Ensuring that elections can't be tampered with _is_ important.
What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.
Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
Which ones?
https://election-integrity.info/2020_Election_Cases.htm
You’ll find similar lists on Wikipedia and at the American Bar Association; they slant their interpretations differently than I do here. Look into a couple of the “standing” or “no merit” cases and see if you really think they were without merit or that there was no “case or controversy” as defined in the Constitution.
Yes, a couple were kooky, particularly around voting machines, but most were “you changed the rules in a way that weakens election security and you are not Constitutionally allowed to do that, since you aren’t the state legislature and the written law is at odds with your rules”.
Now sure, maybe this is one of the "kooky" ones, but then we are back to, which ones? "Here's a list of 100 cases, read them all" isnt a reasonable ask. Getting a handle on this one was a significant (wasted) time investment. One which I already wasted significant amounts of time on back in 2020-2021.
You claim "most" did not get a fair hearing. It shouldn't be hard to pick one and clearly explain what was unfair about it.
Even if you have many companies providing voting machines, it does not deal with the problem of distrust in national elections. Many elections that have recently occurred come down to the votes of a particular small area of the country or district. These districts are likely to be dominated by one voting machine or type of vote machine purchased by the election board at that district. So, effectively you still have a single or a few voting machines determining elections.
There are some key details missing in this story.
1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
I'm all for free markets and capitalism, but I think its not clear to me why some fundamental responsibilities and operations of the government can be contracted out. Is there a way this make sense to anyone?
The new gerrymandered prop 50 districts will replace, at great cost to the taxpayer the bipartisan commission drawn districts which were created not long ago based on another statewide proposition as I recall, which of course was also very costly but at least done with the intention of making districts more fair, ie less gerrymandered. But even that redistricting effort was not fair, leaving republicans with about 15% representation despite being much larger proportion of voters. The new prop 50 super gerrymandered districts would reduce that 15% even further, more or less eliminating the other party.
What is so bad about that, other than the wasted tax payer money (the state is currently in the red), is that this decreases California’s political power in DC. It’s in the interest of the state as a whole, even just democrats, to have representation in both parties at the national level. So not only is it wasteful, and intentionally unfair, it’s bad for everyone in the state. And, it’s being done largely to support Gavin Newsom’s eternal presidential ambitions. I think the bulk of the 300 million spent on ads is from his presidential campaign purse.
Since he has no “presidential campaign purse”, not being a Presidential candidate, that is literally impossible.
$2.6 million (which is, very much, not a majority of the funding) does come from his leadership PAC.
And if you think Newsom doesn’t have presidential ambitions, and that his path to the White House doesn’t depend quite critically on passage of prop 50, you either aren’t paying attention to the full arc of Gavin’s career or being overtly dishonest.
Edit: Indeed my total was off by about 2x, but my general point stands the proposition in detrimental to California’s political power in Washington because it reduces the state’s representation in the GOP power structure, while mostly benefitting Newsom’s presidential ambitions. If you can’t see that I don’t know how to help you.
Compared to now, where the GOP power drained the reservoirs, seized the states national guard without authorization to roam the streets and then migrate to Oregon, and overall labeling the state as everything wrong with thr democratic party? How much did it cost the state or federal to pull off all those stunts?
The redistricting goes back to normal during the 2030 census, and clearly the state needs to work fast against these clear oversteps in power against it. This really isn't the time to play moderatism. The GOP power hasn't these past 9 months. 300m in advertising to make sure the people know this is chump change for the 4th largest economy.
-----
Now all that said, how is advertising for a ballot initiative on any way "rigged"? Even if you think it's dumb and harmful, this is going by thr books, which says the people get to vote on any amendments to the state constitution. Where's the foul play here?
Prop 50 is bad for the state as a whole. It is also undemocratic but let’s not pretend that matters to those involved. Those involved in this who work for the state (people like Gavin) should care about the fate of the state they are supposedly working for more than their own presidential ambitions, no? Especially when that person has little chance of winning at the national level because they do really stupid things like prop 50.
So you're fine with one group kowtowing to the other to "help the state", as one group is illegally withholding congressionally allocated funds on their own whim? L
et's stop being coy and just say what you really think of the current atmosphere as of late. Are you personally done with Unitary Executive Theory in action? If you approve of that then just say Al instead of pretending that we're in a government that is functioning democratically.
>It is also undemocratic but let’s not pretend that matters to those involved.
Let's put it in a more extreme way. If war breaks out and we had a ballot to give the president plenary powers until the war concludes l, is that not still democratic if it is voted for? The action weakens democracy, yes. but the power of democracy includes the ability to dismantle it, As long as that is the will of the voters.
So I see prop 50 as the exact tools of democracy being used. In this case as a way to recognize that everyone else broke the glass illegally, so people doing it "the right way" vote to break the glass.
>Those involved in this who work for the state (people like Gavin) should care about the fate of the state they are supposedly working for more than their own presidential ambitions, no?
What do you think the fate of the state is if it doesn't redistricting, given the event described above? You're being very accusational but aren't addressing the fact that the federal government is in fact attacking the state.
You haven't actually told me anything bad about prop 50 except that "it's undemocratic" and that you think it's stupid. I address the democratic part. If people want to vote for stupid stuff, that is also democratic. We did so in 2024 nationals.
nullorempty•3mo ago
mystraline•3mo ago
During the Biden campaign, there were a few people doing rudimentary data gathering and election machine investigations. After they announced to their bosses, order came from the top to cease all voting machine research and destroy what they did.
We dont know why the order to cease and destroy was issued. But, yeah. A guess was that the existing players bribe both parties, and bribe was called in.
If you want to snoop more, go look at what Defcon's Election village is doing. Quite a few of those findings were damning.
OrvalWintermute•3mo ago
Ancapistani•3mo ago
When I pointed it out I was told that it was policy and they couldn't lock them. They didn't even have a key.
wahern•3mo ago
consumer451•3mo ago
The most egregious example has to be the F-35.
Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
wahern•3mo ago
No, it doesn't. But there's a wide variety of machines, from comparatively simple, tested-and-true Scantrons to the fancy touch screen Dominion machines with conceptually easier-to-hack software and processes, and plenty of nuance across the board. But I think the author's language is still sloppy, if not downright misleading.
Also, IIRC the purchaser of Dominion has publicly committed to ensuring paper trails for everything, which at least 8 or so years ago was a popular criticism of Dominion machines--what paper receipts it did (or could optionally) produce didn't necessarily provide robust accounting of the overall tabulation system. Beyond being a Trump supporter (which alone says very little about any specific individual), there's no reason to think the new owner would be worse for election integrity than the status quo, and arguably some reason to believe integrity might improve. Only time will tell whether he improves the transparency and integrity of Dominion's products. Though I'm more than a little skeptical, not because of nefarious motives, but just because Dominion's position in the marketplace os providing fancy voting tech. The easiest way to improve integrity might be to just shutdown Dominion's entire voting machine product lineup and tell everybody to move to Scantron paper ballots with hand audits, like California does.