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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Dominion voting machines use human-readable printed ballots as a backup auditing mechanism. In all of the disputed states these paper ballots were hand counted (sometimes multiple times) and the original electronically reported results were confirmed.

So how are these voting machines complete bullshit exactly? What do you think the mechanism of attack is, and do you have any sources other than just your speculation?

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https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-repor...

This has the actual data for the hand recount.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/19/us/elections/...

In Floyd county more than 2,000 votes switched sides out of roughly 40,000 votes. So it now has a real world demonstrated error rate of 0.5% which is not insignificant. For example, I would not trust a calculator with a 0.5% error to do my taxes. I wouldn't even us it on an exam.

No votes switched sides. Missing votes were added to both sides because of missing memory cards, or because:

> Floyd County officials discovered about 2,400 ballots that election workers neglected to rescan after a scanner failed and results could not be retrieved from memory cards. Officials attributed the error to “gross incompetence” on the part of the county’s elections director.

They run on MS Windows, and an assorted pile of shitware a mile deep. Bullshit passed through an HP LaserJet is still bullshit.

And why on earth does a voting machine require OggVorbis?

https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/...

Possibly for accessibility features for the blind?

Braille is simpler, and does not require thousands of lines of code, which could obscure all sorts of malicious payload.

I have a bridge to sell to anyone who thinks Dominion has actually audited any of these external dependencies.

Braille is also, famously, very expensive as a computer interface relative to audio (e.g. https://www.boundlessat.com/Blindness/Braille-Displays/Brail... ), plus not as many people can use it as can use audio.

Why must everything involve the computer? It was on paper when I was a kid, didn't require an army of six-figure salaries, and things seemed to go far more smoothly.

And it's still on paper, just now with some electronic augmentation that makes vote counting instant and lowers the error rate.

Do you not remember how problematic the purely paper voting systems were? How many errors were made in the voting and the counts and how long it took to get the final results in close elections? Florida 2000 is a famous, widely-known example. The computers are clearly better.

So, the people who can't get hole-punching and ballot layout right are going to "fix" things with two programming languages, three databases, and a dozen or so support libraries?

Also, Florida 2000 is a strange example, considering the present drama. We've only gone from a simple controversy to a more complex one.

Per Bruce Schneier:

> If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems, and you don't understand the technology.

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