When and why did the US switch to these voting machines that are the subject of ongoing lawsuits and reports of unlawful "updates"?
I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
Each voting district sets its own methods; different areas have different laws. It's a mess.
That's a really cool reply. Thanks for sharing!
I think the lawsuits throwing out mail in ballots for blue counties were far more harmful than "voting machine fraud"
A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that's not even the main problem.
If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.
It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn't even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.
A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we're talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.
And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they'll never get the access to verify it themselves.
Even checking a ballot print isn't foolproof. In a secret ballot system there's nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.
Stealing an election isn't as easy as one might imagine.
Stealing an election doesn't have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.
As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That's just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.
Unironically, I think elections are one of the few scenarios where blockchain technology could actually be useful.
100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.
I don't understand why it's so difficult. In France voting is done entirely on paper and results are often released later that night, and almost all the results are in by the next day. Same in the UK, although it generally takes them a few hours longer, probably because the polls close later in the evening.
I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.
But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.
I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.
For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.
So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all
In California we're all mailed paper ballots, which we can return by mail (no stamp needed) or designated ballot box, or in person at a polling place up to closing time on Voting Day. My ballot (in a westside Los Angeles district) had 37 items, (on about 7 pages iirc) some of which were yes/no on propositions, others of which had a choice between 2 to 15 candidates for various offices. From school board to US President. It was very clear, just needed a black pen to fill the circles, and I could have gotten it in a dozen different languages. It's also accessible for my quadriplegic husband, who can't get to a polling place. But it took time and thought. It wasn't like the pictures I've seen of French ballots which were just a single name on a sheet of paper, take the one from the stack of your choice, I guess? So counting them takes more time. Plus counting ballots that were mailed and postmarked by the deadline, those are allowed 2 weeks to arrive.
*(A couple of edits to clarify details)
I heard Ireland does too, but they also use Rank Voice Voting so it takes them about a week. Seems like a potential benefit that the process of democracy is so visible, imo.
Some places have hybrid machines; an electronic interface but gives you a printout of your choices (like a Scantron form filler). I'm fine with this option so long as hardcopies are preserved for 2 years minimum and randomized checks are performed before and after an election on EVERY machine.
Kansas has the hybrid style so I fill out a paper ballot and it is scanned and the results tabulated electronically with a paper trail for auditing. This actually seems even more reliable to me than only paper or electronic with printed out copies for a paper trail.
Trump's Justice department just demanded all records on 2020 and 2024 federal elections from Colorado.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/11/nx-s1-5426097/trump-justice-department-voter-data-colorado
Washington uses paper ballots absentee only and only needs more than a few hours to figure out results unless there's a very tight race.
Where I live, we have voting machines with a paper receipt. Voters use a touchscreen and then get a printed ballot. The voter can then check to make sure that what they cast electronically is correct, and then the paper ballot is scanned and saved. You can perform an audit anytime you like to compare the instant electronic results to hand counted ballots.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones. No way one of the USPS employees, or a corrupt election worker, clerk, etc. would ever do anything wrong. If anything, our recent elections have shown us really people are infallible & honest, and it is computers that are inherently flawed.
It's far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it's all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it's managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.
Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you'd need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you'd need them all to keep their mouths shut. That's far more difficult than defeating a computerised system
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones
Correct. It is. Because to do enough to change the result you need to do it alot, and that's really hard to get away with.
In Canada we count the ballots with witnesses (called scutineers) to validate.
It's gotta be a distraction from gerrymandering and other more provable fuckery
Yes. Exactly. Votes are counted accurately, and then carefully grouped (gerrymandered) to prevent public opinion from influencing the planned election outcome.
Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.
What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is
that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states
there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.
when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.
the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community
there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout
I remember my country using such machines for some elections before they were considered as incompatible with democracy. We vote on paper again, which is good.
Same here, we're still voting on paper, and I hope that never changes without good reason.
I guess it varies by jurisdiction. In my state we fill out paper ballots, then you just insert the ballot into a machine which records your votes and prints you a receipt.
How are you going to implement managed democracy?
paper ballots
Just FYI, I think most, or at least every voting machine I've used in GA, actually prints a paper ballot that then is read by a machine (or maybe a human, not entirely sure).
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they're immune to some sort of foul play. I always triple check my choices and triple check the printed ballot. But is there some sort of nefarious trickery in some machine readable only part of it? Perhaps. I personally don't think there is, but who knows. I'd love to be proved wrong. I'd love to see the fascists suffer.
To be 100% clear, I don't think there isn't foul play going on, I'm just skeptical that it's specifically in the voting/counting machines, but I haven't also read up on the most recent of claims from the past few weeks about it.
We did it cause money. And lobbying. Same thing.
There's also a difference, because our elections typically have only a few races on them. In other words, at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing. Typically four to six options.
In a us election, there can be a ballot containing choices for many different levels, including judges, district attorneys, and so on. Not to mention they might have several referenda on the same ballot too.
I could see that being much more complex on paper, making electronic voting attractive.
Still that's a solved problem. You just use different color coded papers for each item that has to be voted on.
I really don't get the US's difficulties with paper votes. It's so easy to understand literal preschoolers can understand it. I know because our children voted on meal choices in preschool every time an election happened in Germany.
It's super transparent. You can just watch the counts or even count them yourself if you doubt them.
It's fast. If you have enough voting districts counting takes an hour or two. Maybe a few more if you have a big district with many different issues to vote on.
Almost everyone can understand how it works. Even many literally mentally disabled people. I find this to be the most compelling argument for paper voting. You leave noone behind. It's a super simple concept to grasp that reaches every citizen. But with electronic voting you need to have a degree in computer science to understand that it is not transparent at all what is happening inside the machine.
at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing
I'm guessing you're a Canadian that was using voice-to-text with your device's language set to "US English".
In American English, "writing" and "riding" sound the same. But not in Canadian English. Or British English, but for a different reason.
I’ve honestly liked the systems we have in our county. They’re a digital system but you feed in a straight sheet and it reads your district. From there you select on a touch screen all of your selections and then print it out. You have a chance to review the ballot at that point to make sure everything is printed out right. You then slide it into another scanner which counts the votes and drops the ballot into a secured box, that way should they need to audit things you have a paper trail too.
A lot of voting systems changed after the 2000 election. States should have adopted the paper ballot with optional scanning, but a lot of states didn't for various reasons.
My voting location has paper ballots counted by scanners (it's not practical or accurate/reliable to count that number of ballots by human hand).
If there's a question, just rescan the ballots. Nothing's perfect, but this (IMHO) is about as good as it gets.
The only change I would make is to have ranked choice voting.
GOP can use actors, like russia and now elon to change/hack the machines to vote in thier favor. this is more prevelant in red areas than blue ones. Remember mitch mcconnels last election, he had the same exact situation, more people voted blue in those areas, but somehow the votes still went to mitch.
Pen and paper works pretty well. Everyone who can read/write/count understand how it works and can be appointed as a political/citizen observer.
Moreover, if the count is public (not in the US but it's the case where I vote) everyone can see the counting and get the number, all it takes is people having 2h to give to their country to help counting or just watch it.
This make fraud almost impossible
2024 Election Results Under Scrutiny as Lawsuit Advances
https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-lawsuit-advances-2083391