this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
144 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
59211 readers
2598 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It scares the shit out of me that the US has so fully adopted voting machines. They are incredibly unreliable and it would be so easy for a bad actor to hack an election. Especially with FPTP, it would be so easy to goose the numbers in a couple of key districts and swing an election for whomever you wanted to win. It's almost definitely already happened several times.
In Canada we still do voting on paper, but then the votes are counted electronically and the paper copy is kept for recounting by a human later if needed. It's sort of the best of both worlds.
It's not everywhere.
States that do vote by mail are just like you describe -- paper ballots collected and counted by computer, with the paper preserved.
Not all states are fully electronic. Many districts (including mine) are run on paper ballots that are then scanned.
I would be more concerned about the upstream tabulation systems. The possibility of making bulk changes is much more harmful than tampering with single voting machines.
There was a mad dash to electronic voting after the Bush v Gore hanging chad fiasco. A lot of people are still focusing on the voting machines vs. the integrity of centralized tabulation systems.