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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

The big question is what do we do about it? What do we do if an election is actually stolen?

Go back to manual count, have people count the votes, and citizens check over their shoulders, as it should be. It's still the case in e.g. France (larger voting pop than any one US state).

There should be zero trust in an election. Citizens don't have to trust the party or any machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

The UK is the same.

No-one here seems to be asking 'WHY' there's even a need for electronic voting machines? Paper and pencil manual voting will always be safer as it's almost impossible to game the system when there's 10,000+ unpaid volunteers double checking each others counting.

Electronic Voting is a solution looking for a problem. It's only advocated by the losing parties, as they are convinced that making it 'easier' to vote (really? It's not like it's hard) will get more bums off seats and into polling stations, which will increase their chances of winning said election.

NASA spent millions on a space pen, that never worked properly; The Soviet Union just used a pencil.

> NASA spent millions on a space pen, that never worked properly; The Soviet Union just used a pencil.

Someone has to, might as well be me. The reason you want a pen in space instead of a pencil is that graphite can chip off, and cause lethal danger to electronics and (consequently) crew.

It's just a silly urban legend anyway. Fisher developed the space pen independently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space

Grease pencils and felt tipped markers were among the early alternatives.

I knew it was. I forgot to put the /s sarcasm on my post!

Based on the last 20 years, nothing. There is no effective recourse.

Voting with your feet is highly effective.

That doesn’t truly set things right, though. It’s a compromise for you, and doesn’t fix things for the country itself. In fact the ‘good’ people leaving makes the country even worse.

Moves more people into better countries. (So the population-weighted average country gets better, too.)

Why care specifically about the country you are leaving?

The only correct answer should be hack them. But hack them in a way that's so obvious and outrageous nobody will ever try to claim they're "good enough" or "the only way forward".

I think an effective way of doing it would be to make numbers very close to an expected result but they have a simple mathematical relationship to each other, so they get widely published and aren't picked up straight away and hidden, and then show that they are all divisible by 46 or something.

You would just be labeled a conspiracy theorist for pointing out such a coincidence.

I'm sure that even if you're doing it with good intentions getting caught hacking voting machines could put you in a lot of troubles. If people here seriously want to try that make sure you understand the risks you're taking.

You just gave me the mental image of a worm which targets voting machines and has them run pacman or space invaders. Bonus points if it quickly re-infects machines, or persists in ways they cannot remove. That'd be something to launch during a major election.

It's illegal and dangerous to whomever does this. But at some point, nothing but blunt disobedience works.

This i like. Reminds me of the Blackadder politics/voting episode where despite there being 1 voter there is 16,472 votes.

Some result where 10 times the voters all vote for one candidate.

Georgia just had all these things happen, including one precinct with a 243% turnout. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/georgia-defends-... No outrage appeared.

Any result where one candidate can have a landslide win with 120% of the votes.

It depends on the party in power. What you think should, won't matter. Most people accept the opinions, decisions, and accusations of the party they support.

The bigger question is -- how do you know?

Compare results to statistical polls?

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