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points by oatmeal1 1 day ago | 0 comments

Biden definitely won, but our election security should be a national scandal. Voting machines should never connect to the internet and shouldn't run closed source software.

John Oliver had a fun segment on it:

https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0?si=DkVJ-z3ALD6B2GFk

[–] Johnny555 1 day ago

And they should use paper ballots. Use machines to tabulate, but keep paper ballots as a record and for recount.

[–] nemomarx 1 day ago

They do here in pennsylvania, even with an electronic touchscreen. The ballot is printed and you check that it recorded your stuff correctly and then immediately put into a lockbox for tabulation later.

This seems like a fair compromise as long as the actual ballot is on paper and human readable?

[–] Johnny555 1 day ago

The hand-filled ballot seems safer, few people are going to check every single race to make sure the printed ballot matches -- my ballot had about 2 dozen races to vote in (it included a bunch of judges, school board positions, etc), that's a lot of double checking. Make the person fill it out by hand first, then read it by computer.

[–] bobthepanda 1 day ago

WA conducts vote by mail like this, and it works fairly well; we’ve had scantron technology for decades at this point.

[–] fhdkweig 1 day ago

This is the same method as Georgia using Dominion machines. The printed paper has human readable text including the candidate's name and party so it can be verified by the voter.

It also included a QR code that I couldn't read (phones not allowed in the voting area) and don't know what it is for. I'm hoping that it doesn't tie a voter's identity to the printed ballot (that would violate privacy of secret ballot). If it is just a machine-readable copy of the human-readable to make it easier for the computer to read the paper for a recount, it would have been better to just let the computer OCR from the human-readable text. That would make it verifiable by the voter that the machine-readable QR code matches what the voter actually intended. If the human readable text isn't what the recount uses, then it doesn't really help.

But I don't know if that is what the QR code was even about, which is why I really wish it wasn't present.

[–] EricDeb 1 day ago

Definitely. Paper trail is an absolute must. Use machines to count the paper ballots and then if anyone wants to contest the results they can pay for a 3rd party to hand count the paper ballots.

[–] UncleMeat 20 hours ago

This is what they already do in the bulk of states.

[–] jiggawatts 1 day ago

I love Americans making arguments against things like paper ballots or health care on the basis of "it's too expensive for such a large country", as-if these things aren't paid for on a per-capita basis.

Every other country, big or small, can afford to do these things.

(Meanwhile, the voting machines are more expensive!)

[–] maxerickson 1 day ago

Paper ballots are all but universal in the US. There's exceptions, but not a lot.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state

[–] AuthAuth 1 day ago

Who says they should never connect to the internet or run closed source software? Plenty of places do and have no issues with election security.