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Comment by corrys | Hacker News Reader

Hand counting can be manipulated too [0], so the idea that we can just move back to it and save our democracy is not accurate (or at least not a complete solution). In other words, dishonest politicians will find ways to exploit our fears even if we use paper ballots.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02613...

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No one ever claimed that hand-counting is perfect. Is isn't. For example, all of the Chicago ballot boxes that famously ended up in Lake Michigan in the middle of the last century.

But hand-counting works because it's virtually impossible to coordinate fraud widespread enough to actually make a difference. Whereas, if your entire voting system is computerized and all the computers are linked together, causing widespread changes are much more possible.

Good thing hand counting can be (and is) used with the Dominion voting machines to verify the electronic result, then.

Certainly a good thing!

Do let me temper that slightly :

Some states didn't or didn't fully have a paper trail quite yet https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

Also, be aware that Dominion voting systems actually acquired the old "Diebold Election Systems", who were not so secure a couple of years back. (though things may have changed by now, of course) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions

Note that it looks like the states on that list that have “DREs without VVPAT” (electronic machines without a paper trail) are Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas on that list, along with some DREs without VVPAT in Kansas and Mississippi.

Since Trump won 7/8 of those states, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that Trump’s team successfully hacked the electronic machines in those states that have no paper trail.

However, there’s really very little reason to believe there was fraud in this election - but those republican states (and New Jersey) should replace their DREs without VVPAT by the next election so that they have a secure paper trail for auditing.

So the machines are redundant?

You linked to an abstract of the Russian vote manipulation behind a paywall. That abstract says nothing specifically about hand-count being manipulated.

Hand counting remains the golden standard for voting.

All allegations against Dominion voting machines were pretty much disproved by subsequent manual vote courting. Again, the machines leave a paper trail that allows manual counting for verification. That makes simple handcounting without any assistance more prone to errors and less paper trail as well.

In what world would manual counting have less paper trail?

What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.

All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?

Voting by hand takes days, which is why it is only done automatically for close elections.

However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.

If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.

Voting by hand takes days - in the US. Not in Finland, France or the many other countries where voting is done by hand 100% successfully for decades with timely results.

Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.

Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.

36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.

The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.

What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.

That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).

If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.

You scale by district. You just get more people involved in the counting per ballot location.

It's a scalable method. Yes, the reconfirmation at the regional levels are important.

Your faith in machines is questionable. I leave you with this obligatory xkcd - it's still completely valid: https://xkcd.com/2030/

In my state, the machines print out paper ballots in legible English saying exactly who I voted for.

I don't trust the machines, but I do trust the people doing the counting, especially since the counting process is observed by both sides.

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