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Group Gathers Intel on It's War on Voting Machines (reuters.com)
3 points by fny on Oct 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


The only trustworthy electronic counting of votes system is optical scan coupled with hand count audits to prove machine function statistically.

The only trustworthy votes cast are those cast by people making marks that change physical media in some enduring way. Can be a pen, hole punch, whatever.

The reason for these two facts is there is a chain of trust between the voter and their intent and the record of that intent. When the voter expresses that intent physically, and that physical expression issued directly to arrive at the final tally, the voter knows their intent is correctly recorded and their intent contributed to the election.

Optical scan can read the human expression of intent directly. The human can see their mark and confirm the enduring record of their vote intent is accurate.

When counted, and audited, everyone can know the results are true and the election can then grant authority in a meaningful way everyone involved can live with.

Should all that somehow be challenged, all the votes can be hauled into court where they can all be counted and the election resolved again in such a way as to be just and true.

When we force people to cast votes electronically, a subtle but very important thing happens:

The actual expression of their voter intent is not used for the final tally! That expression exists as a grease smudge on a screen or button, lost to all involved as many voters use the device!

The machine records what a program interprets that voter intent to be.

Worse, the actual record is not human readable leaving the voter no way to know whether a correct record, or even whether there is a record, of their intent contributed to the final tally! And this is true whether they are given a receipt, some light or screen tells them something, or a sound is made, or all of the above happen!

Fact is the record is Biden away away from everyone and the election result is simply not trustworthy and cannot be proven in any court because the expressions of voter intent necessary for that to happen were not recorded, and instead a proxy interpretation is all we have.

The fact that people can vote or not and vote with anonymity is what makes elections a special case different from virtually every other way we use computers.

Banking, for example, has personally identifiable records and accounts and multiple ledgers all of which can be used to understand when a transaction went wrong.

Unless we are willing to make votes publically identifiable and employ more common means in use today, no electronic election should be trusted. Nobody involved can know who won with any degree of confidence.

Frankly, the tech should be made illegal as the use of it forces well meaning citizens into an position of forced trust and easy abuse with no recourse.

Paper records, optical scan plus hand count audits, or hand counts all around make sense.

Nothing else really does and it amazes me how, despite these points I make here have been well proven multiple times all over the world, we continue to employ tech that is not appropriate.

Over and over.

Really makes a person wonder.

Now, these people challenging elections are a PITA, right?

Simple. Hold elections on paper ballots, use optical scan with audits and perform the count in public.

Problem solved. No joke.




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