Why I Support an Election Audit, Even Though It’s Unlikely to Change the Outcome | Hacker News Reader

Why I Support an Election Audit, Even Though It’s Unlikely to Change the Outcome

fivethirtyeight.com

16 pointsjohnny3135 comments

To be honest, this is awful optics. So many people were criticizing Trump on the rigged election rhetoric, its weird to see the mental gymnastics about auditing the election from certain figureheads now.

I do hope now that both parties seem to believe its rigged or needs auditing. We can get some real reform, like voter id laws and paper trails like most other reasonable countries. ex. India has voter id laws, and I think Ireland scrapped electronic voting.

It has been hilarious to see the government become the opposition and vice-versa. It is like around midnight on election night they've just exchanged their scripts and switched places overnight.

Demanding a recount is so quaint in this age of electronic voting machines which can be untraceably hacked.

If the voting machines (or vote counting machines) have been compromised, no amount of "recounts" are going to do any good.

If anything, a recount puts a fig leaf of legitimacy over a thoroughly broken system.

All the electronic voting machines I've used in Illinois create a paper trail. I believe a paper trail is a requirement for any voting systems in our state. Even if 90% of people don't check the paper copy at the end, the number of people do who check would almost certainly ensure that any fraud would be detected.

In order for such a hack to be successful, you'd need to keep the paper trail the same and modify only the digital results. The only way that would be successful is if you only hacked machines in races that were unlikely to be audited. Close races, and races with unexpected outcomes are almost certainly the most likely races to be audited. If the race isn't close, then why the fuck are you hacking the machines in the first place?

Quick edit: If you were going to look for examples of hacking, you'd probably want to look for reports of non-functional paper trails. Surely the paper trail is the most likely part of the machine to break since it has moving parts, but you may be able to detect races where the machine broke at a higher rate. You'd want to check the machines that broke for voting totals that were significantly different from the other machines/voting methods at the same voting location.

A direct comparison to other voting methods might not be relevant, since particular demographics might be more inclined to choose one voting method over another.

Some States still have paper ballots. For example, in Virginia, I fill out a paper ballot and it gets scanned electronically to capture the vote but the ballot is still available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com