Georgia election official: Machine glitch caused by last-minute vendor upload
politico.com
politico.com
For example, make it read only in a way that no updates and BS can be pushed remotely at anyone's convenience. And if it needs to be updated, have a usb terminal unlocked via a physical key that the officials will have with them. Download an update imagine to any USB, plug it in, et voila. Anything, anything other than live updates will be an improvement.
Even if you start with the best of transparency and integrity, it always seemed like a terrible product-market fit.
Your customers are perpetually underfunded states and counties, who have transient, low-paid staff to actually administer the gear. They are not the sort of audience that's going to say "a big, complex, proprietary, expensive Technology Solution? Where do I sign up!"
We have reasonable "automation friendly" balloting designs-- Scantron style fill-in-the-circle ballots can be quickly machine read, but still manually audited. That feels like the sweet spot-- it fits into tiny budgets, and requires little user or setup training.
So what are they saying to local elections boards to get them on board with touchscreen snafus?
"Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists — even as he blocks election security bills" - https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/mitch-mcconnell-takes-check...
> David Cohen, who lobbies for Dominion Voting Systems on issues related to election security and monitors federal legislation for the company, gave McConnell $2,000 on March 31: $1,000 to his campaign committee and $1,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Lobbyist Brain Wild, who works alongside Cohen on the Dominion contract, gave McConnell $1,000 on the same day.
It's almost as if "Voting-Machine Lobbyists Undermine the Democratic Process" - https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-voti...
Both our politickings aside, Dominion is one of the largest sellers of voting machines so there are good odds that if there's a problem then it's one of their machines.
My point is more one that simply showing a connection between X and Y means little on its own.
That also doesn't mean there can't be an implication of being bought. As Trump described it in 2015: “I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
A lot of really smart people have been working on this for decades. Electronic voting isn’t actually an easy problem.
State of Florida was given millions of dollars after 2000 Bush vs. Gore fiasco in revamping its voting infrastructure, I can't find the source of the exact amount.
Besides the legal challenges in voting process, there seems to be a ton of low-hanging fruit in this industry from Technology standpoint. From automatic ballot opening machines to high volume processing of ballots, forgery detection, traceability, etc. I don't think electronic voting is a good idea, but I am curious what has been done in the "analog" voting process to improve its speed/efficiency, etc.
Edit: Found the source of funding, Congress has approve $380 million for improving voting infrastructure in 2018: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fede...