Dominion Voting Systems doesn’t give a flying fuck about the culture wars, but they do care if people stop buying their products. Fox on the other hand very much cares about the culture wars, and is as shown here perfectly willing to lie.
During all of this election denial I've been sitting around thinking to myself every now and again: Wait, haven't we been trying to talk about how the software in these machines should be open for public review? Weren't we concerned about the political biases of these company's owners? It worries me that now if you say something like "well, actually, I'm concerned about election integrity" a lot of people will think you're going full culture war.
In 2020 I worked at a polling place that used the same machines (not in Georgia). Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This printout is turned in, and the QR codes are scanned to tally the votes. In the event of any concerns with the computer tally, a recount can be done of the human-readable printouts. This is what was done in Georgia (for procedural reasons this was technically a "hand audit of 100% of the votes", which can be done at the SecState's discretion, not a "recount" which can only be triggered by certain requirements, but it is actually the same thing).
The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals.
Voting machines that do not create such a paper trail should be illegal, and anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.
This is not an acceptable design. Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs, but any scanner must scan the human-readable marks, not some machine-readable marks because the voter can't check that both sets of marks match.
> The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals.
Intentionally obfuscated paper trails. The problem is that none of this is required. Paper works. Paper + optical vote-checkers works. Nothing beyond that works, or is needed.
> anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.
Lol, total agreement. But ... why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
I don't think I agree with the first part. Marking by hand is probably more error-prone. People are notoriously not great at correctly filling in a bubble, leading to scanning errors. Any UI bug should be caught thanks to the human-readable printout. If I select Biden and my printout says Trump, I'll notice.
The second part, I think I agree. It should print out a perfectly bubbled-in human-readable ballot. That would seem to remove both human bubble-filling error and QR-code shenanigans.
> why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
The one and only added chance to change the vote is to alter the QR code to something other than the human-readable selections, and this is trivial to check by having humans sample a few thousand ballots.
The other way to change it would be for the QR reader software to lie about what it read, but you could do that with traditional bubble-ballot reader software too. In both cases, having humans sample the ballots is the solution.
> > Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs
> I don't think I agree with the first part. Marking by hand is probably more error-prone. People are notoriously not great at correctly filling in a bubble, leading to scanning errors.
Perhaps, but risk of systemic failure allowing a vote to be stolen is the paramount concern. UI errors (esp on randomized ballots) tend to balance out.
The UI concerns are real, but they can both be addressed physically and through ballot design.
> the QR code to something other than the human-readable
You wouldn't want to have a QR code though, if you simply read the human-readable marks. The QR code is some sort of premature optimization based, I think, on the assumption that scanning is difficult. If you have only one mark then you know it's the canonical mark.
> Any UI bug should be caught thanks to the human-readable printout. If I select Biden and my printout says Trump, I'll notice.
Real ballots often have twenty or more choices so this is harder in practice.
And you're trusting a machine's UI at each step. It's telling you which marks mean what rather than you marking the paper according to instructions on the paper. A paper ballot can't be altered after the fact to change your vote, any machine-generated paper can simply be reprinted.
The correct answer, if anything is needed at all, is an under-vote detector. It doesn't tell you how you voted, it just says "no selection is readable for Mayor" or "You only made four marks for City Councillor but are allowed to place up to five votes", and so on.
The challenge now is to ensure all 50 states are on board with using machines with no known exploits. Unfortunately some states are lagging behind greatly (can you guess which ones?)
The problem is that it introduces all these failure cases.
Pen+Paper's only drawback is that it's said to be slow, in practice it can be finished same-day by booking enough elections volunteers.
> but it is better than having no paper record at all
That's a weird standard. "Sure, it costs a lot and introduces all these weird and nigh-undetectable failure cases but the other machines were even worse! ..."
> the option of a manual recount
Which will be fought, of course. They always are. So in the end only some areas will ever have a human audit.
The public deserves that every vote be hand counted by a bipartisan team.
I've actually gone to viewing parties at pubs for the last two US elections. Your media dominates ours.
Why use machines at all? In my opinion any action that does not remove the machines altogether is not good enough. Machines are hack-able, humans are much harder to "hack", especially if you have both parties' representatives in the room at all times.
Nobody really wants "instant" results, if you get 90% of the count the night of the vote, that will be good enough. I come from Romania, and we only count by hand, and by 10PM you usually know the results with pretty high confidence. Romania only has 10 mil votes, but as I said, it scales very well.
Thats a lot of overhead and costs that is not going to fly with voters.
> I come from Romania
Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US.
I actually understand it, it's very similar for us. Why would you immediately assume it's different? In the UK it's different, it's incredibly quiet and somber. And I just told you that we finish counting earlier than many if not most US states anyway. Recounts happen but are limited to individual poll stations, because of all the party representatives they have very few chances of changing anything.
It's really not that much overhead, the US has 900k people operating the polling stations on the voting day (https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/fil...).
That means 10 workers need to handle 1600 votes. It's really not that much, you can manually count those in a couple of hours once the polls are closed. Also, you can tap into volunteers from both parties.
I really don't understand the US: you have half the country saying that the 2000 elections were decided by malfunctioning counting machines in Florida. Now in 2020 you have the other half distrusting machines for fear of tampering, and you still rely on machines? why?
This is the norm in Europe, poll stations count their own votes and they get tallied up centrally. e.g. Germany https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-ger... or UK https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its...
e.g. When talking about laws or policies that positively discriminate based on skin color, someone said "this wouldn't even be a discussion in Europe, it would just be accepted". I had to point out that it would actually be illegal/unconstitutional in all places I know about in Europe.
Another one: All of Europe, except the UK, has voter ID requirements, some stricter than others.
I will add manual vote counting to my list.
Not sure how old you are, but look up "hanging Chad". Gore didn't come out and say the 2000 election was stolen, but that was definitely part of the Zeitgeist on the left, and it did get pretty hysterical. Not to the level of 2020, but it was a level you only read about in history books
Also, don't forget 2016 where Russian infiltration was the only acceptable explanation for why Trump won and not that half the population genuinely hated what the Democrats had to offer and were desperate for anyone different than the status quo in the aftermath of the uneven GFC recovery. There were definitely political hysterics then. Only difference between 2016 and 2020 was that the losing candidate didn't openly push the theory as forcefully in the aftermath of defeat.
Luckily Obama won both his terms handily, otherwise similar controversies in 2008 and 2012 would have been likely.