I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Voting machines are the most utterly stupid thing ever created. Why don’t you use paper ballots as other countries do?
I’m with you, The Tom Scott Video @puppy linked is amazing, goes over good reasons against electronic voting machines. Paper Ballots are great because the counts are done in the presence of all parties and by multiple people. It takes a while, but it’s a good example of technology not always being a viable option for everything.
As said in the video, not everyone would understand code. The only reason why people vote is because they trust in the system. If they don’t trust in the system they don’t vote. They could open the code up and show people, but it wouldn’t dispell fears of those who aren’t knowledgeable about computers.
We do, there are very few counties in the US that are actually fully digital (stupid idea IMHO). The majority are paper ballots which are scanned into the machine for fast counting. The original paper the voter filled out is then stored in case it needs to be checked against the machine count for accuracy.
Interesting that it takes so ridiculously long to count then, in Germany the votes are counted on paper by hand and they’re down within maximum 3 days.
…does it take ridiculously long? I’ll admit I’m not usually on the edge of my seat waiting for election results, but it’s usually just a couple days after voting closes I think. Some places accept mail-in voting way after the election technically closes so they technically take longer to count votes, but that’s more the exception than the rule.
It only started taking more than one day recently. My conspiracy theory is that it is so we have to watch the news for three days instead, which makes them a ton of money.
In Washington we have all early voting results and some of the early results from that day by the time polls close on election day. Then an update each day with those processed that day with the remainder that trickle in over the next couple of weeks (e.g., mail in ballots from overseas, challenged ballots that need to be “cured”) until the election is certified.
Most places where there is a delay, it is intentional and written into law/regs–like, that each ballot and its signature has to has to be verified by a human before it can be scanned. And, if, hypothetically, a party wanted to cast doubt on an election, they could send representatives to challenge each and every ballot and slow the process down–and simultaneously cry foul that the process is taking so long. But no one would do that, right? /s
My state only does paper ballots and voting by mail. I completely agree that voting machines are completely unnecessary.
They have been working perfectly fine with pretty much no downsides or security issues here in Brazil for over 20 years. Generally any “issues” making rounds in the news are a right winger mad that they weren’t elected so they claim the machines are unsafe and can be tampered with, with absolutely nothing to back their claims. Paper ballots are considered unsafe and retrograde.
My county/state does paper mail-in ballots by default (they look like this ) As someone else said, a machine does scan them (like the standardized test forms in school), but the paper ballot is saved, for review, if necessary.
There are plenty of people that take issue with mail-in ballots too. People are just never happy, and seemingly want someone to feel “in the know” about (eg conspiracies)