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Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

There is no argument here.

The fact is that you should never let electronic voting machines ever in the first place. I went crazy the first time I saw them in the US long time ago and said: "this is the end of democracy"

You should only count physical ballots in front of someone that represents all the parties.

As an engineer I can not trust them. There are 20 different ways I can cheat using those machines, from network hacks to software that self modifies.

The US election system is a joke, with no national ID card.

The worst thing is that they are trying to import those defective systems into Europe.

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Re: "There is no argument here." can you clarify what you mean? Are you making an argument that electronic voting machines resulted in an incorrect election outcome?

Are there any voting machines that actually SOLELY tabulate electronically that don't have a paper record?

I believe they all print out a ballot or receipt that records the vote and those are what are counted/scanned and or can be in verifications/recounts

(maybe i can't think of an example let me know if so i would also agree that not having a paper record is bad but i dont think it exists).

Yes there are. In 2016 I voted in Indiana on a voting machine that was all-electronic. I didn't put my vote down on paper, and the machine didn't produce a paper record for me to examine. After I voted, I asked if I could have a record of my vote, and was told I couldn't.

In 2020, in the same city, I voted by marking a paper ballot and inserting it into a machine which scanned it and output it into a sealed box.

wow that's bad I thought it was all gone but looks like a couple luddites. i just found this source [1] sounds like LA lacks it statewide yikes. sounds like Indiana's law says not until 2029... sarcastically, you know, because it takes that long (more likely they have no funding and refuse to raise taxes/take fed money).

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting...

Next-day correction: during the 2016 election, I voted in a different city (about an hour's drive away, but in the same state) from the city that I voted in 2020. I was attending college in the city where I currently live and vote, but at the time I was still registered to vote in my hometown.

What good is a receipt if a user can literally “correct” votes in a silent “adjudication” process and just print the “corrected” numbers?

I don’t buy a lot of the claims going on here, but what does a receipt do if you don’t trust the machine? Or more importantly the operator?

I know in parts of Virginia as late as 2014 it was electronic only. I am not sure about more recently.

Nothing you just stated is evidence.

If we are at the point that we have to have "evidence" (in the legal sense) that fraud has occurred in order to resolve the outcome of an election, then the water is under the bridge. Voting process and procedures should all be designed to build and strengthen transparency, to fortify the process against actual fraud and vague assertions of fraud that can't be trivially disproved.

We find ourselves in a situation where the processes have been constructed in such a way that there is suspicion about the outcome and logistical difficulties at disproving what should be by design trivially disprovable, this just creates a terrible feedback loop of mistrust. The argument that we don't need better controls until actual widespread fraud can be proved in a court of law seems mistaken to me. We need the controls to keep us from getting to the point where a forensic analysis is needed to discern what happened during an election.

I realize that there are legitimate concerns that better voting controls can result in "voter suppression" but our haphazard approach to voting controls and process transparency has left us in a place where large numbers of people are suspicious and there doesn't seem to be any effective way to counter those suspicions in part due to the haphazard controls.

With respect, that isn’t why large numbers of people are suspicious.

That is just too cryptic to respond to specifically, but I certainly don't claim that my comments explain everything that is going on.

I'd argue we need evidence that there was a fair election, not evidence that there was fraud. If there's non-trivial ambiguity, there's room for fraud, and people will likely enough exploit it.

Stupid example: What if only Republicans were allowed to count ballots, and the only result you got was a number of votes that they told you, and they threw away all of the records. It would be impossible to get evidence, but you wouldn't need any evidence to rightfully distrust the result.

Purely electronic voting systems are analogous, though it differs in the details and degrees of things.

Arguments are distinctly different to evidence/facts.

I agree about the need for paper ballots. I disagree with the indefensibly broad claim that without a national ID card, it is a joke.

But it's a shame there's no national ID, because then both sides would have to stop griping about disenfranchisement and fraud.

I posted this response in another comment, but I'll post it here because I've seen so much misinformation on the topic. This website, https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat..., shows voting methods by state, and you'll see that nearly all of them produce a voter-verifiable paper trail.

Here are the list of states that have at least some electronic voting withOUT a paper trail:

Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas

7 of those states were won by Trump, 1 by Biden, and none of those states were even within 15 percentage point margin except for Texas, which Trump won by 5 and a half percent.

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