Why I bought a voting machine on eBay
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's almost nothing worth reading here.
I was surprised to see that the website of the BBC's first cyber reporter has so much horrible third party stuff on it - https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=joetidy.co.uk
But in certain tech circles - Israeli tech in particular - "Cyber" has a very specific meaning and is very much used today. It refers to what we in the US call Security / InfoSec.
For example:
https://israelcyberalliance.com
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/israel_national_cyber_dire...
I could not believe that got left in there. Definitely a draft, and somebody had opened the wrong window when context switching!
Looks like this was really intended to be published. Weird, with all due respect.
Edit: And it's not been accidentally reverted to a draft - it already was this way two days ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20201004160433/https://www.bbc.c...
Not that traditional process cannot be altered - communists won election in Poland in 1946 by falsify it, however they had all secret police working on it backed by Soviet tanks - but this is much harder and doing it en mass is nor practical.
All- or mostly-mailin ballots are concerning to me for many reasons which overlap with electronic voting: not secret, much easier for third parties to get involved in, etc. However at least the physical ballots have to exist and can be hand counted if necessary.
Then there's the possibility of selective sabotage of postal service in opposition areas ...
The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections.
One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone.
The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.
Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess: https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disquali...
This also defeats the point of democracy.
Machines can not and should not be trusted for voting, no matter what fancy schemes are dreamt up for to make them supposedly verifiable.
Voting can not be legitimate unless machines are taken completely out of the loop and humans are the ones doing all the vote counting by hand from end-to-end.
Yes, there can still be fraud, but it will of necessity be quite limited and relatively easy to detect than if voting and/or vote counting was done by electronic means.
Elaborate?