Teardown of a $1000 Voting Machine | Hacker News Reader

Teardown of a $1000 Voting Machine

unfoxo.it

4 pointsunfocso10 comments

Really interesting article. Love the absolute waste of resources spent on these.

related / the way: https://www.voting.works/

OP conclusions (in my bias) feel like "an attempt" ahead of elections next month. My bigger concern is our own US military doing some really illegal things around social election manipulation and misinformation.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/how-the-military-will-hack...

This comment was clearly made by a bot that didn't read the article nor understands it's not US related.

you can search my handle if you like, your comment is a weak deflection because... I'm not sure what you are hoping to accomplish with it, but it does ring my state actor manipulation warning bells ;] For a reverse uno card, your PhD work is really interesting and far more meaningful than mine was.

The article has little statements sprinkled throughout that are easily used to undermine trust in an election. Sometimes the articles do not need to promote the idea themselves, but the larger manipulation machine does better when they can point to more "evidence" of "hackable" machines.

At the same time, I do not disagree with the absurd waste. This is why I shared a link to an interesting project that can help with this. Paper only voting, with human tallies, is far more expensive than machine tallying and also more prone to error.

You believe that US state actors have influence over this Italian consultant group and are trying to spread mistrust of the 2026 US elections by analyzing flaws of a machine used in Lombardy in 2017?

I'm saying the people who spread election lies will use anything and everything they can

US state actors are insidious, nothing would surprise me

>The article has little statements sprinkled throughout that are easily used to undermine trust in an election

Of course!? This election was fully digital, no paper ballots, you'd enter and press a button and you preference would be registered. For what it's worth, the entire operation could've been completely faked. There was no transparency at all in the process.

The article would've been completely useless if this machine was a ballot marking device and you could check back that the ballot was correctly marked, but except for a "Thank you for voting" dialog, here there was no proof at all that your vote was registered and counted.

Do you know, are there other related articles that get into who was behind the decision to do this and the rationale?

From what I have seen, both extremes (fully digital / fully paper) are both unworkable. Fully digital will never be trusted, fully paper is too expensive and error prone (human labor).

>VotingWorks paper-ballot voting system

I don't understand. Is this a paper-ballot voting system only? Because the idea of this vote was to prevent paper usage and move to digital. The system you mentioned system mainly focuses on counting (and marking?) paper ballots?

It's an open hardware system, so we can have transparency and trust in the system. It's meant to counteract the elections are not safe propaganda, among other things.

Fully digital systems are a bad idea because it makes it too easy for people to sow doubt. We don't need to open ourselves to that as a society.

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