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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Voting machine manufacturers and election overseers responded to the criticisms! The vast majority of electronic voting in the US today is done with a physical paper receipt paper trail: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting...

Notice that nearly every state requires voters to approve the paper copy of their vote.

The digital record is only used to speed up tabulation. In the case of recounts or contested elections, paper records are hand tabulated by humans (a recent example were the Arizona recounts for the 2020 election).

Where are you located that you didn't have a paper receipt you were asked to approve when you voted?

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VVPAT is worse than useless; creating the illusion of physical chain of custody. Most voters don't even look at it.

How can any one verify the recorded and tabulated votes match the VVPAT?

I've attended the "auditing" of VVPAT machines. The "audit" only demonstrates the printer is functioning. And each time, at least one of the printers failed (paper jam, bad hardware, etc). So they swap gear and reprint the VVPAT.

All DREs should be banned outright. They are and always have been an existential threat to election integrity.

PS- The VVPAT is not a receipt. Giving voters a receipt allows vote buying, coercion, etc.

It's been a while, and election administration is the wild west, so although I don't recall any jurisdiction issuing voting receipts, I wouldn't be surprised if someone does.

This is all the same whataboutism propogandists use to undermine normal democratic elections.

> creating the illusion of physical chain of custody

How is this any different than paper ballot voting? Someone is going to collect the paper ballots and count them and put them into spreadsheets.

> How can any one verify the recorded and tabulated votes match the VVPAT?

In the US they literally pay hundreds of election workers to hand count paper receipts in the event of a recount. This is what happened in Arizona in the US.

> This is all the same whataboutism propogandists use to undermine normal democratic elections.

Yup.

Bush v Gore and then Bush v Kerry motivated me to become an election integrity activist. Along with some chicanery in my own state. My friends proved, in court, that Kerry actually won New Mexico (the machines didn't record spanish language ballots), and compelled them to dump the DREs and switch to paper ballots. I also knew people in Ohio, NC, Georgian, Kentucky who uncovered similar problems. But those state's laws didn't permit challenges, or the records (evidence) was destroyed, often illegally.

It's with deep chagrin that all of our findings and talking points have since been weaponized by a cult hell bent on ending our democracy. Sometimes I even wonder if my friend Bev Harris (Black Box Voting) demonstrating how to hack Diebold live on TV was a mistake.

> In the US they literally pay hundreds of election workers to hand count paper receipts in the event of a recount. This is what happened in Arizona in the US.

Ok. I just wasted 30 min quickly figuring out how Arizona currently votes. https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/2022_Election_Cycle_Vo...

Paper ballots. Optical scanners for poll sites. Image scanners for central count. Ballot marking devices for accessibility.

No VVPAT.

No receipts.

Whatever you think about Arizona's 2020 recount circus, the end result was greater confidence in the outcome (for the reality based community). Only because Arizona uses paper ballots.

> Paper ballots. Optical scanners for poll sites.

Okay, again - what's the big picture difference between VVPAT and paper ballots that are scanned by a computer? If the computer leaves a receipt that I have to sign and confirm and leave with them - how's that different than one I do by hand and have scanned? It's just a difference in the order of operation.

Ya, good question. This stuff is confusing and no one explains it properly.

With a DRE (eg a touchscreen) the legal ballot is the memory card. The VVPAT is like a log file printed to a cash register paper roll. VVPATs are not the legal ballot of record. Nor are they used for tabulation. Some jurisdictions may use the VVPAT for recounts or audits, but I wouldn't know. In other words, "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail" is a lie; It's not used for auditing, and most voters don't even look at it.

The implementation of VVPAT isn't really intended for tabulation. It's thermal paper, easily damaged. There's no standardized format. There's no gear for scanning it. The content doesn't even look like a ballot.

Also, with the Australian ballot system, private voting and public counting, there are no receipts. (Whether or not DREs and postal ballots qualify as Australian ballots is another discussion.)

I think maybe a ballot marking device (BMD) would fit your goals. The UX is like a DRE. But a BMD generates an actual ballot. That is then treated like any other ballot, fed into a separate tabulator. BMDs do not tabulate.

I think BMDs are great. I'd bet that every election integrity activist would agree.

Every statement I make should include a "YMMV" caveat. Every jurisdiction (state, county) can potentially do their own thing. Worse, the details (gear, laws, rules, procedures) keep changing. So there's always a lot of thrashing getting everyone onto the same page.

Please keep asking questions. None of this stuff is intuitive, or works how people expect. It took me years of intense effort to get up to speed, which shouldn't be the case.

> Some jurisdictions may use the VVPAT for recounts or audits, but I wouldn't know.

I don't understand your statement. You say you don't know if it's used for auditing... then you claim decisively it's not used for auditing?

> There's no standardized format. There's no gear for scanning it.

That's exactly the point - you are only looking at these by hand in the case of a recount?

Again, if I am trying to perpetrate voter fraud, enough to change an election, how do I do it with a VVPAT? Do I change their answer and hope that no one notices their vote got changed on their receipt? Or send a different answer to tabulation that would be caught in the event of a recount?

Both of these possibilities seem no different than a BMD. How do I know the tabulator machines themselves are not compromised? It seems like a weird distinction to trust one but not the other.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpe...

In Brazil there is no paper or paper trail to audit later.[1]

Indeed it is a very contentious matter because opposition claims paper trail will allow people to get a receipt and sell its vote (not true) but they don't want the paper trail system were after you confirm your vote is cast in a lacred box.

You are supposed to trust it because it is.

If you don't you are against the democracy.

[1] - You can at final hour generate a report from all electoral zone but there is no way to "go back" and audit it with paper trail.

You can't compare the difficulty of faking a real human entering a ballot into an observed sealed container, during a short period of a day, versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper which have all be gathered into a centralized location and then left for months, and then when irregularities are found they are simply ignored.

The first requires a high number of conspirators per votes faked. You will at best get a ratio of hundreds of votes per conspirator. The second only requires a handful of conspirators with good access to essentially overturn entire elections with leads of hundreds of thousands of votes.

And it's not even the electronic part that is the most crucial. The fact that a single election worker is officially in charge of the integrity of tens of thousands votes, only made possible with the assistance of the machine, is the real issue here. That machine could've been 100% OK but it's not designed to protect against the election worker - on the contrary, it's designed to give him oversized power.

All you need to realize the farce is just watch a video where a single person counts tens of thousands of votes, and see the officials response to the video is to admit that indeed that is what happened, but "the votes were legitimate". A single person isn't responsible for thousands of votes in a real democracy.

> versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper

If you bothered to follow the link, you would see that most states require voters to review and sign their ballots.

Again, even if you tried to sneak a small amount of fraud into the system, would no one catch it?

Yes and: I just reread that (excellent) ncsl.org link from 2019. Some tidbits:

Ballots are not signed. In my jurisdiction, if a voter signs their ballot it spoils the ballot.

NCSL links to (also excellent) Verified Voting, which is kept current. (D'oh. That would have saved me some research effort.)

https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...

Note that Arizona does not use DREs and so does not have (or need) VVPAT. Instead, Arizona went with the much superior ballot marking device (BMD) for enfranchising disabled voters.

When only a single person alone is responsible for thousands of ballots, who do you expect to catch it?

Come to Israel, watch our elections. You'll understand how real democratic elections look like, where from the process itself you can dismiss most fraud allegations. It would take hundreds of independent fraud instances to change a single seat. These security guaranties do not exist in the US. It's like the difference between encrypted and unencrypted communications, where the American gaslighting is the equivalent of saying man in the middle is a conspiracy theory.

> When only a single person alone is responsible for thousands of ballots, who do you expect to catch it?

We catch voter fraud all the time in the US. Part of the reason we know it's not a big issue is that we catch so many people in a given year. If you read up on the multiple rounds of recounts and audits Arizona or Pennsylvania did this last federal election, I think you would have a lot of respect for the people who designed these systems to withstand the scrutiny of endless lawsuits.

> It would take hundreds of independent fraud instances to change a single seat. These security guaranties do not exist in the US.

It sounds like you are getting bad information about US elections from second hand sources. Anyone who actually takes the time to analyze their local election would probably come to the same conclusion you do about yours. They are remarkably transparent and well audited.

That does not stop bad actors from using endless speculation to try to undermine people's faith in elections. But I can attest that I would trust our local elections as much as anywhere else's in the world.

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