Comment by adriancr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriancr | Hacker News Reader

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> Did you read the right wikipedia article? The ballots were paper ballots! The poor design caused people to vote for the incorrect candidate. What machine are you talking about?

From same article:

"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."

It looks like you haven't read the article.

I'll make it short:

- machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.

- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.

- bad result was used to alter election result.

As such, in your situation, if the voting machines you keep arguing for will produce wrong results, we can expect the same result, lawsuits and supreme court deciding election instead of the people.

Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.

If you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.

> Its so funny to see how HN people tend to be so ignorant of the real world because they think they know best. After all they are hackers right? Sooner or later they always get smacked with reality.

Kind if ironic, don't you think?

You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.

You are ignorant of real world risks.

You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.

You know best.

If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.

>"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."

So they improved a bit? Thats good? They are still using Optical scanning with no risk limiting auditing which is not great. What are you even arguing anymore?

>machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.

You don't know that. You are making an assumption while improperly understanding what did happen. It wasn't the machines that messed up, it was the people caused by the paper ballot. I cannot believe it is so difficult to understand that a machine producing a consistent printout is better to verify than trying to decipher what humans have drawn in a circle.

>- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.

Again you are conflating two separate issues. The cause of the supreme court blocking the recount was the poor paper design. If the count was concluded before the networks called it then there wouldn't have been exposure to this seperate issue that activists needed to work on.

>Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.

Not if there are laws and processes on the books or else you could just do anything like throw out the paper ballots with some nonsense stating they are tampered with.

>You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.

Its the system that all the election security researchers say is the best system for the US's complex ballots. I trust them more than some rando on HN. Not to mention that it makes sense.

>You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.

This is the height of ignorance, thinking that since something works in one locale that it automatically works best in all other environments.

>If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.

Hence two way auditing....

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