The fact that a single company has this much potential influence on US elections is the real issue here. The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.
That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.
Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.
Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.
> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.
>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
>The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
Only one party tried to overturn an election, repeatedly refused to acknowledge they could lose and respect the result of the election, and is propped up by anti-democracy billionaires.
Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night. Al Gore didn't concede in 2000 until over a month afterward. Gore initially conceded, retracted it, demanded multiple recounts and fought his loss in the courts all the way to SCOTUS.
Both parties have many billionaire donors - the Democrats are at about 10% of all donations, the GOP at about 30%.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, the only thing that I see that has changed with Trump is that his administration is doing openly what has traditionally been hidden from the public.
In Gore's case, we had a razor thin electoral result that hinged on a single state with less than a 550 vote margin against 5.96 million votes cast, or 0.009%. We can argue about how many recounts there should have been, but it makes perfect sense there'd be some contention when the entire election came down to so few votes.
To his credit, he conceded the day after the Supreme Court made their ruling, exhausting his final legal recourse.
You may notice a distinct absence of attacks on the US capitol during the certification of either the 2000 or 2016 elections. You'll also do well to note that Bill Clinton in 2000 and Obama in 2016 dutifully aided their Republican successors getting up to speed with their office on the way in, sharply contrasting Trump's treatment of Biden's incoming administration.
And, to this day, Trump still hasn't publicly conceded his 2020 loss. Quite the opposite - on multiple occasions, he's voiced the opinion that he should be allowed to run again in 2028 to make up for his "stolen" second term.
There are still plenty of Republican members of Congress as well as many state-level Republicans who maintain the 2020 election was stolen.
You would have a hard time finding a single elected Democrat at either the federal or state level who would claim any presidential elections were stolen from their party's candidates.
There is no good faith argument to be made that both parties are the same in this regard.
You are completely wrong, as shown by the other posts. Time to reflect on why and readjust your biases and the gaps that let you fall for clear lies (in the case of Clinton) or muddled thinking (in the case of Gore).
Dems aren't even reopening the Russian interference case once Mueller gave his mediocre report, whereas Trump still says and forces everyone around him to say that 2020 was rigged.
- vote marking machines (eg it marks a voter readable ballot that is the official record). You get fast preliminary results and improved voter accessibility but still have very high tamper resistance.
?? In NYS the main process for voting is voter marks their paper ballot and then scans the marked ballot into the “reader” (DS200). Optionally, there is a “marking” machine (Automark) which has accessibility features. But this machine only marks the ballot, and does not read. The marked ballot must still be scanned.
Are you proposing to eliminate the single scanner and have a new machine developed which marks and scans ballots?
If that’s the case, that would be incredibly expensive and greatly slow the voting process. I say this having worked at polls for 15 years.
My jurisdiction in Canada uses an OCR machine on a paper ballot. The paper ballot is the official record and recounts are done by hand. Seems to be the obvious way to do things.
It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR.
I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.
American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.
I'm not comfortable without having a physical "receipt" that shows my vote that I can take with me.
I understand why we don't do that - it would enable people to pay for votes with confidence, or to influence the votes of others via intimidation - but it would certainly make me feel better.
You don't take it with you. It's your ballot, and you submit it into a lock box when you're done. One A4-sized piece of paper with your legibly printed choices and a QR code is your ballot.
When they count your vote later, they have a high-speed system that can scan all the QR codes almost instantly. It's why we know the results in as little as an hour.
If there are any questions, or if the race is tight, a team of auditors can look at the ballot pages to check for any discrepancies. They'll check to make sure the machines themselves weren't tampered with by checking that the printed names and other ballot initiatives match the QR codes.
Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling. They're almost as bad as punch-ballot.
The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:
- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).
- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.
- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.
>- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
How do you ensure secret ballots when it's printing an opaque identifier (the QR code) on your ballot?
After the elections you sample the ballots to make sure they match. If you find any instances of error, that immediately raises red flags about the entire vote set.
i think 2020 election proved there are strong legitimacy reasons to prefer a quick count that is almost certainly correct with subsequent paper verification
people attribute some of the election denialism to the fact that initial results showed Trump winning followed by a very late night reversal due to delay in counting mailins
It's also sometimes the case that rural and suburban precincts report before cities, which obviously slants results toward Republicans in early returns.
But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
fair enough, i can just see the potential for more uncertainty and even violence being injected to the process if it takes multiple days to declare a winner and so worry.
Plain paper ballots work very well in other countries. That would probably need more adjustments in organization though in the US. And we still get fast preliminary results at 6pm the same day.
I think it is obviously on topic for this article specifically highlighting this problem and doubt I'm being downvoted due to some neutral criterion separating 'machine' from 'policy'.
> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
No, it’s a rabbit hole argument that appeals to people who are ignorant of the reality of identity or are fine with disenfranchising people.
Given the context that the federal government is currently rounding up US persons and detaining or exiling them without due process, it’s a doubly asinine argument.
this is much more “argument by free association” than anything i said. i simply said we should have a national ID. the current per-state system is a mess and laughable from the rest of the world
The system is such that there are 6,000 jurisdictions issuing ~20,000 types of birth certificates in the United States. It's a bonkers system, and relying on these breadcrumbs for a fundamental right is awful.
For 80% of people, national ID is a no brainer. The other 20% are the issue, and it's a problem that won't be solved in this framework of government in the US.
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:
1. voters mark paper ballots
2. observers from all parties watch the counting
3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
That won't stop the election cranks. In the 2020 election there were accusations of election fraud centered around workers "stuffing" ballot boxes or otherwise acting suspiciously.
1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.
Which is it?
Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot
This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.
I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.
At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.
> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).
What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
If votes are counted by hand, you have to systematically corrupt hundreds, maybe thousands of people across jurisdictions. With machines you only have to corrupt a single person.
>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.
What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
Great, so I’m sure that you will not complain at all if Democrats lose in the future where a single company controls so many voting machines, unless they are able to prove fraud beyond a reasonable doubt in mere days after the election, right? And you’ll not complain if the vast majority of the suits filed are dismissed on procedural grounds such as standing, right? Because voters and candidates and state attorneys general obviously have no case or controversy in a contested election?
Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
>The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
So, what you are saying, in essence (and without any examples of the "cast majority" of serious cases that didn't get a fair hearing and that I, and almost everyone, somehow missed), is that there is no real justice system in America.
Well, then it is time to put your money where your mouth is: grab your guns and start a civil war. If there is no justice system, your country is a failed country anyway. You can only kill your way out. There is no other alternative.
Funny that with full control of the Congress, the Senate, the presidency and a completely compliant DOJ and FBI we still haven't seen any proof of anything. It should be an easy case, a home run if you are right, uh?
Or, you know... You may be delusional. Try to give it a thought.
And, notably, Republicans have been making claims of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats since well before Trump, have gotten into state office in part on a message of cracking down on it, followed up with investigations, and come up with... nothing. A handful of "whoopsie" mistakes (still prosecutable, sure, but probably not done on purpose) and the odd one or two actual attempts at individual fraud, with no strong partisan slant. No conspiracy, no rampant fraud at all.
Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.
How did a man/company with annual revenue <$20M/year obtain the capital necessary to purchase a company that has $787M in receivables from the Fox News settlement?
> Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
No, it doesn't. But there's a wide variety of machines, from comparatively simple, tested-and-true Scantrons to the fancy touch screen Dominion machines with conceptually easier-to-hack software and processes, and plenty of nuance across the board. But I think the author's language is still sloppy, if not downright misleading.
Also, IIRC the purchaser of Dominion has publicly committed to ensuring paper trails for everything, which at least 8 or so years ago was a popular criticism of Dominion machines--what paper receipts it did (or could optionally) produce didn't necessarily provide robust accounting of the overall tabulation system. Beyond being a Trump supporter (which alone says very little about any specific individual), there's no reason to think the new owner would be worse for election integrity than the status quo, and arguably some reason to believe integrity might improve. Only time will tell whether he improves the transparency and integrity of Dominion's products. Though I'm more than a little skeptical, not because of nefarious motives, but just because Dominion's position in the marketplace os providing fancy voting tech. The easiest way to improve integrity might be to just shutdown Dominion's entire voting machine product lineup and tell everybody to move to Scantron paper ballots with hand audits, like California does.
I had some friends who worked in CISA. Had, cause they were fired, RIF'd, early retirement, etc. They have been gutted.
During the Biden campaign, there were a few people doing rudimentary data gathering and election machine investigations. After they announced to their bosses, order came from the top to cease all voting machine research and destroy what they did.
We dont know why the order to cease and destroy was issued. But, yeah. A guess was that the existing players bribe both parties, and bribe was called in.
If you want to snoop more, go look at what Defcon's Election village is doing. Quite a few of those findings were damning.
The ones in my precinct had exposed USB ports accessible to the voter while behind the privacy curtain. There was a lockable door to cover them, but they were left open.
When I pointed it out I was told that it was policy and they couldn't lock them. They didn't even have a key.
Once the company sells the voting machine to some state or city I would assume the voting machine is not "owned" by the company anymore. I'm also assuming they aren't in any way connected to a network and are all isolated independent systems.
The state should be auditing them prior to using them to see that they work as expected.
The hand-wringing in this article about Republicans signing up election monitors and having lawyers on stand-by is absurd. Both parties pour huge amounts of resources every election into this sort of thing and aggressively pursue it. If you really want integrity in elections you should want interested parties to be able to audit the results and mount legal challenges if they feel it is justified (and, yes, that means all interested parties and not just who you consider to be the "good guys").
That is some serious whataboutism based on the actions in the last election. One side wants people to be able to vote (some mass too loosely), the other side wants to limit voting to people who attend to agree with them and if it fails, simply hold up the results of negative outcomes until the election is effectively decided.
Slightly tangential question: Why doesn't the government "own" the intellectual property for their citizens to vote?
I'm all for free markets and capitalism, but I think its not clear to me why some fundamental responsibilities and operations of the government can be contracted out. Is there a way this make sense to anyone?
Snopes has this as mixed because Stalin may or may not have expressed this sentiment at some point, but it seems impossibly unlikely to me that this pun works in Russian as it does in English.
Maybe we should just go back to the old school way? It seems like there have been grievances about voting machines for so long and it causes distrust to the entire system. The whole hanging chad issue in the 2000 election is a prime example.
This is less about technology than it is about process. Specifically:
1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election.
2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.
Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.
I cant help but notice that most people who are of the opinion that everyone should vote on Election Day, in person, and on a paper ballot that is hand counted, also have an issue with tabulation taking time.
Can somebody point out the "MAGA Oligarch" link here? Scott Leiendecker is a former Republican election official, and the linked article says the company is "repped by" (presumably a PR agency?) that uses Trumpian imagery, but that seems to be the extent of the connection.
(I know that already might seem a lot to some people, but I was wondering if there was anything to justify the title beyond that.)
If there was no fraud, and all the recent elections were secure then this wouldn’t matter.
My contention has always been that until we see the basis of identity secured like Estonia/CAC/PIV/Passports through strong identity proofing and robust processes, we are not ready to talk about the Pandora’s box that is voting machines.
given the money required it seems like it with always be one or the other that owns these? Maybe governments should own the machines (people would still complain)
disclosure, i am biased and think everyone should use paper.
In the U.S. each state runs their own part of the federal election.
In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.
I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.
We use paper in Australia and generally have a result by the next day (2010 being an exception due to hung parliament). We also have a very strict chain of ownership and auditible vote counts ledgers, if they're really looking for anti-fraud measures they could come and observe our AEC
Other countries tend to have only one or two contests, which makes counting easier. In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan. You can still have high confidence in this case if you do a risk-limiting audit.
IIR, the US's huge push to (computerized) machine voting was after the 2000 election, when Florida's Democrats demonstrated just how badly they could screw up with paper ballots:
10 years ago, this wouldn't be a concern at all. I feel like something changed inside the US government since then. Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian who previously tried to manipulate an election became president, and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from, bought a voting machine company.
Ugh - OK, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve in this thread.
I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.
From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.
I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:
> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian
Agree. No notes.
> who previously tried to manipulate an election
I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
> became president,
Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.
> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,
A couple of points here.
First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.
We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.
> bought a voting machine company.
Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?
> I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
It was almost certainly Trump's intent to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I do not see why else he and his personal lawyers would go through such convoluted efforts to do all of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Trying to intuit Trump's state of mind is always a funny game that is played when discussing whether or not he lost the 2020 election, but you often end up with two possibilities: 1. Trump is a sane person who is lying about the results of the 2020 election to rile up his base (very plausible) or 2. Trump is a delusional person who willfully ignored the advice of his Vice President and Attorney General (less plausible, but even more highly concerning given this person was voted into office twice).
> First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
One note: I don't think this is right. Trump did very-swiftly take over the party, but not because of Obama and Biden. Republicans and Republican-friendly rich dudes and organizations deliberately built up a propaganda machine after Nixon, and that machine molded an electorate very far right with the aim of ensuring they'd always vote against Democrats—but to support a party that shared very little of their cultivated electorate's far-right aims.
I have also spent a lot of time in red areas and come from a mostly-red family, and typical Republican politicians from Reagan on traditionally have talked a pretty unconvincing game and really just run a pro-(big, monopolist)business/pro-rich party when in office. They could depend on their captive electorate because they'd convinced them the democrats wanted to give illegal immigrants jobs grabbing Republican voters' guns while funding their free abortions with taxpayer dollars and handing the US government over to the UN or something (this is, for readers not familiar with this crowd, a glib presentation but not really an exaggeration of the kind of thing these folks really do worry will happen when Democrats get in office, and probably the least-accurate part of that passage is that Republicans might think Democrats would give illegal immigrants jobs rather than just tons of free money to illegally-vote for Democrats or something like that—that this stuff hasn't happened when Democrats have gotten in office doesn't seem to register as meaningful to them, for some reason)
Trump started talking like a Republican voter, not a Republican politician. "Why don't they just build a wall?" "What does NATO do for us?" "Why don't we just ship illegals out wherever we find them, the constitution doesn't apply to them, probable cause doesn't apply, et c." (dip a toe in social media outside left-wing bubbles and you'll see a truly alarming amount of stuff like that latter sentiment) and disturbing support for military action in "lawless democrat cities", "democratic politicians are all constantly doing crimes up to and including secret murders, we should prosecute all of them"—this is shit their media has been telling them is true and good for decades, Trump's just the first option they've had who's crazy enough to act on any of it. You could hear it on AM radio in the '90s, you could overhear it in a rural diner in the '00s, no problem. This is who their voters are, and have been since before Obama, before Biden, and even before Trump.
He took the party over by exploiting a weakness the party itself had spent enormous resources and decades developing in cynically seeking a powerful tool against the Democrats. Their plan worked really well, but left them vulnerable to the first person positioned to credibly claim to want to do all the stuff Republican voters have been told they should want, but denied by their Republican politicians (because a whole bunch of the ideas are wasteful, insane, totally pointless, or extremely dangerous to democracy or the rule of law, so, to economic stability)
For people who have lived decades in red America before Trump, when he started talking, I think a lot of us saw he was dangerous pretty fast. Not because he was saying crazy shit we'd never heard before, but because he was saying crazy shit we'd heard all the time.
I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :)
I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. Trump and his admin are emboldened, and what little resistance there was to domestic actions just… dissolved.
> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right.
I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.
I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored.
It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.
Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.
Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win.
There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
No-one is truly neutral in this scenario. The previous owners Staple Street Capital are headed up by a bunch of guys from The Carlyle Group. Harvey Schwartz, CEO of the Carlyle Group was a big Biden guy.
Democrats want people to vote. Republicans want to stop people from voting. There is minuscule numbers of people who voted when they shouldn't have. There is massive numbers of people who can't vote despite having the right.
Your whataboutism and bothsidesism is something you invent to make yourself feel good. It has no relationship with reality and it is destroying your country and your mind.
The fact that a single company has this much potential influence on US elections is the real issue here. The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
> The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
Yeah that's a nice thought, but it ignores a whole lot of recent evidence to the contrary.
Half the country feels the way you do. The other half felt that way for the past four years.
If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.
Half the country is wrong. I agree that centralized ownership is a problem regardless of party, but putting on both sides blinders is not the answer.
In that case, do you agree a one-party state, run by Democrats, would be "correct"?
In the context of election security, yes.
Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.
Dominion didn't, but it became a focus of blame by Trump for the 2020 loss, and so to MAGA it became, like all enemies, part of the Radical Left.
The discussions I've seen on the right certainly indicate that they believed Dominion to be affiliated with the left.
As for the reality, I can't say. I've not done the legwork to have an informed position.
So it didn’t move from one party to another
That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.
Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.
Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.
archived version: https://archive.is/xvdh0
If only the other party owned intolerable influence over the machinery that counts the votes, we'd be safe!
If only a neutral party had that influence.
> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.
>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
>The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
Only one party tried to overturn an election, repeatedly refused to acknowledge they could lose and respect the result of the election, and is propped up by anti-democracy billionaires.
Respectfully, I don't believe that to be true.
Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night. Al Gore didn't concede in 2000 until over a month afterward. Gore initially conceded, retracted it, demanded multiple recounts and fought his loss in the courts all the way to SCOTUS.
Both parties have many billionaire donors - the Democrats are at about 10% of all donations, the GOP at about 30%.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, the only thing that I see that has changed with Trump is that his administration is doing openly what has traditionally been hidden from the public.
Oh man I forgot when Clinton and Gore egged on a mob in an attempted coup as well
See: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/cal...
See: https://apnews.com/article/fb2e92a47f054019a2589ace78d20836
Based on the former link, Hillary gave her concession call to Trump at 2:50 AM EST.
She gave her public concession speech several hours later.
See: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/clinton-concedes-to-t...
I'm rather curious what more you expected.
In Gore's case, we had a razor thin electoral result that hinged on a single state with less than a 550 vote margin against 5.96 million votes cast, or 0.009%. We can argue about how many recounts there should have been, but it makes perfect sense there'd be some contention when the entire election came down to so few votes.
To his credit, he conceded the day after the Supreme Court made their ruling, exhausting his final legal recourse.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/14/uselections200...
You may notice a distinct absence of attacks on the US capitol during the certification of either the 2000 or 2016 elections. You'll also do well to note that Bill Clinton in 2000 and Obama in 2016 dutifully aided their Republican successors getting up to speed with their office on the way in, sharply contrasting Trump's treatment of Biden's incoming administration.
And, to this day, Trump still hasn't publicly conceded his 2020 loss. Quite the opposite - on multiple occasions, he's voiced the opinion that he should be allowed to run again in 2028 to make up for his "stolen" second term.
There are still plenty of Republican members of Congress as well as many state-level Republicans who maintain the 2020 election was stolen.
You would have a hard time finding a single elected Democrat at either the federal or state level who would claim any presidential elections were stolen from their party's candidates.
There is no good faith argument to be made that both parties are the same in this regard.
You are completely wrong, as shown by the other posts. Time to reflect on why and readjust your biases and the gaps that let you fall for clear lies (in the case of Clinton) or muddled thinking (in the case of Gore).
Dems aren't even reopening the Russian interference case once Mueller gave his mediocre report, whereas Trump still says and forces everyone around him to say that 2020 was rigged.
Al Gore (2000) and H. Clinton(2016) are counterexamples to that statement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586134 No they're not
One more MAGA lie
So you and your priors claim.
IMO the answer has always been:
- vote marking machines (eg it marks a voter readable ballot that is the official record). You get fast preliminary results and improved voter accessibility but still have very high tamper resistance.
- risk limiting audits in all jurisdictions
> “vote marking machines”
?? In NYS the main process for voting is voter marks their paper ballot and then scans the marked ballot into the “reader” (DS200). Optionally, there is a “marking” machine (Automark) which has accessibility features. But this machine only marks the ballot, and does not read. The marked ballot must still be scanned.
Are you proposing to eliminate the single scanner and have a new machine developed which marks and scans ballots?
If that’s the case, that would be incredibly expensive and greatly slow the voting process. I say this having worked at polls for 15 years.
My jurisdiction in Canada uses an OCR machine on a paper ballot. The paper ballot is the official record and recounts are done by hand. Seems to be the obvious way to do things.
It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR.
I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.
American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.
pretty sure this is how it is typically done in the US and pretty sure Canada even uses these same machines mostly
Canada does not use those machines. I challenge you to find a Canadian election that used machines of any kind.
Some states are really behind.
Several states use Scantron, and a few jurisdictions (IIRC) still use punch ballot.
The state of Georgia uses these modern "digitally select, then print a ballot with QR code and legible names" ballots. They're great and feel optimal.
I'm not comfortable without having a physical "receipt" that shows my vote that I can take with me.
I understand why we don't do that - it would enable people to pay for votes with confidence, or to influence the votes of others via intimidation - but it would certainly make me feel better.
You don't take it with you. It's your ballot, and you submit it into a lock box when you're done. One A4-sized piece of paper with your legibly printed choices and a QR code is your ballot.
When they count your vote later, they have a high-speed system that can scan all the QR codes almost instantly. It's why we know the results in as little as an hour.
If there are any questions, or if the race is tight, a team of auditors can look at the ballot pages to check for any discrepancies. They'll check to make sure the machines themselves weren't tampered with by checking that the printed names and other ballot initiatives match the QR codes.
In idaho we have a paper ballot and scantrons (effectively).
Simple, cheap, fast, and easy to audit.
I don't really see why this isn't the standard beyond very dense populations needing bigger election offices or ideally extended early voting.
Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling. They're almost as bad as punch-ballot.
The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:
- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).
- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.
- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.
This system feels perfect.
> Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling.
There's no way to design a voting system that won't confuse some percentage of the population.
But when I said "scantron" it's not an actual scantron. The ballots look like this [1]
I don't really see how you could make that easier to fill out.
EDIT: Gah, they make it hard to create these links.
Click on district "1921" to see a sample ballot.
[1] https://gisprod.adacounty.id.gov/apps/electionday/#/
>- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
How do you ensure secret ballots when it's printing an opaque identifier (the QR code) on your ballot?
Statistical auditing.
After the elections you sample the ballots to make sure they match. If you find any instances of error, that immediately raises red flags about the entire vote set.
In a close election, you comb over the results.
That's not my question. What's preventing the machine from encoding my name in the QR code? That breaks the concept of a secret ballot.
Trust.
If such a scheme was ever discovered, it would make national news.
I don’t think the QE is really needed. A reasonably formatted ballot that is almost always machine marked should be trivial to OCR.
Combined with risk limiting audits you have a very strong system
Isn't "just trust me bro" approach to elections the whole reason for the OP and the wider election fraud controversy?
Just use paper, that's the answer. It works fine. There is simply no need at all for a machine to be involved.
> You get fast preliminary results
A non-problem. Exit polls can do this if you really need it.
The best systems are hybrid electronic + paper.
A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.
A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.
You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.
i think 2020 election proved there are strong legitimacy reasons to prefer a quick count that is almost certainly correct with subsequent paper verification
what reasons
people attribute some of the election denialism to the fact that initial results showed Trump winning followed by a very late night reversal due to delay in counting mailins
It's also sometimes the case that rural and suburban precincts report before cities, which obviously slants results toward Republicans in early returns.
But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
fair enough, i can just see the potential for more uncertainty and even violence being injected to the process if it takes multiple days to declare a winner and so worry.
Plain paper ballots work very well in other countries. That would probably need more adjustments in organization though in the US. And we still get fast preliminary results at 6pm the same day.
- a national id that is easy for any US citizen to acquire (and a separate, similar id for all legal residents)
drive by opinions aren't really helpful, we're talking about the technical voting machines, not election policy
I think it is obviously on topic for this article specifically highlighting this problem and doubt I'm being downvoted due to some neutral criterion separating 'machine' from 'policy'.
> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
No, it’s a rabbit hole argument that appeals to people who are ignorant of the reality of identity or are fine with disenfranchising people.
Given the context that the federal government is currently rounding up US persons and detaining or exiling them without due process, it’s a doubly asinine argument.
this is much more “argument by free association” than anything i said. i simply said we should have a national ID. the current per-state system is a mess and laughable from the rest of the world
The system is such that there are 6,000 jurisdictions issuing ~20,000 types of birth certificates in the United States. It's a bonkers system, and relying on these breadcrumbs for a fundamental right is awful.
For 80% of people, national ID is a no brainer. The other 20% are the issue, and it's a problem that won't be solved in this framework of government in the US.
seems like we should hire 1k software engineers and assign 20 birth certificate types to schema standardize and ingest to each
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:
1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
That won't stop the election cranks. In the 2020 election there were accusations of election fraud centered around workers "stuffing" ballot boxes or otherwise acting suspiciously.
Two thoughts:
1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.
Which is it?
Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/
[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...
[2] https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/
> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot
This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.
+1000
I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.
At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.
>The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly.
I think you have that the wrong way around.
The benefit of hand counting is that it scales very poorly.
This is what my state does. It works great.
> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).
What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
If votes are counted by hand, you have to systematically corrupt hundreds, maybe thousands of people across jurisdictions. With machines you only have to corrupt a single person.
>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.
What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
Great, so I’m sure that you will not complain at all if Democrats lose in the future where a single company controls so many voting machines, unless they are able to prove fraud beyond a reasonable doubt in mere days after the election, right? And you’ll not complain if the vast majority of the suits filed are dismissed on procedural grounds such as standing, right? Because voters and candidates and state attorneys general obviously have no case or controversy in a contested election?
Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
>The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
So, what you are saying, in essence (and without any examples of the "cast majority" of serious cases that didn't get a fair hearing and that I, and almost everyone, somehow missed), is that there is no real justice system in America.
Well, then it is time to put your money where your mouth is: grab your guns and start a civil war. If there is no justice system, your country is a failed country anyway. You can only kill your way out. There is no other alternative.
Funny that with full control of the Congress, the Senate, the presidency and a completely compliant DOJ and FBI we still haven't seen any proof of anything. It should be an easy case, a home run if you are right, uh?
Or, you know... You may be delusional. Try to give it a thought.
And, notably, Republicans have been making claims of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats since well before Trump, have gotten into state office in part on a message of cracking down on it, followed up with investigations, and come up with... nothing. A handful of "whoopsie" mistakes (still prosecutable, sure, but probably not done on purpose) and the odd one or two actual attempts at individual fraud, with no strong partisan slant. No conspiracy, no rampant fraud at all.
Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.
How did a man/company with annual revenue <$20M/year obtain the capital necessary to purchase a company that has $787M in receivables from the Fox News settlement?
There are some key details missing in this story.
I'd think the feds or individual states should own the machines...
I think it's sloppy wording and rhetoric by the article author. AFAIU most jurisdictions do purchase and own their machines, as opposed to leasing.
But we live in the age where it's normal to buy something, and yet not really own it.
The most egregious example has to be the F-35.
Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
> Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
No, it doesn't. But there's a wide variety of machines, from comparatively simple, tested-and-true Scantrons to the fancy touch screen Dominion machines with conceptually easier-to-hack software and processes, and plenty of nuance across the board. But I think the author's language is still sloppy, if not downright misleading.
Also, IIRC the purchaser of Dominion has publicly committed to ensuring paper trails for everything, which at least 8 or so years ago was a popular criticism of Dominion machines--what paper receipts it did (or could optionally) produce didn't necessarily provide robust accounting of the overall tabulation system. Beyond being a Trump supporter (which alone says very little about any specific individual), there's no reason to think the new owner would be worse for election integrity than the status quo, and arguably some reason to believe integrity might improve. Only time will tell whether he improves the transparency and integrity of Dominion's products. Though I'm more than a little skeptical, not because of nefarious motives, but just because Dominion's position in the marketplace os providing fancy voting tech. The easiest way to improve integrity might be to just shutdown Dominion's entire voting machine product lineup and tell everybody to move to Scantron paper ballots with hand audits, like California does.
I had some friends who worked in CISA. Had, cause they were fired, RIF'd, early retirement, etc. They have been gutted.
During the Biden campaign, there were a few people doing rudimentary data gathering and election machine investigations. After they announced to their bosses, order came from the top to cease all voting machine research and destroy what they did.
We dont know why the order to cease and destroy was issued. But, yeah. A guess was that the existing players bribe both parties, and bribe was called in.
If you want to snoop more, go look at what Defcon's Election village is doing. Quite a few of those findings were damning.
voting machine security was such a joke as shown by many, and J. Alex Halderman most recently
The ones in my precinct had exposed USB ports accessible to the voter while behind the privacy curtain. There was a lockable door to cover them, but they were left open.
When I pointed it out I was told that it was policy and they couldn't lock them. They didn't even have a key.
Once the company sells the voting machine to some state or city I would assume the voting machine is not "owned" by the company anymore. I'm also assuming they aren't in any way connected to a network and are all isolated independent systems.
The state should be auditing them prior to using them to see that they work as expected.
I don't really think this is that much of a problem, but perhaps we should have a bit more diversity in voting machines.
The hand-wringing in this article about Republicans signing up election monitors and having lawyers on stand-by is absurd. Both parties pour huge amounts of resources every election into this sort of thing and aggressively pursue it. If you really want integrity in elections you should want interested parties to be able to audit the results and mount legal challenges if they feel it is justified (and, yes, that means all interested parties and not just who you consider to be the "good guys").
That is some serious whataboutism based on the actions in the last election. One side wants people to be able to vote (some mass too loosely), the other side wants to limit voting to people who attend to agree with them and if it fails, simply hold up the results of negative outcomes until the election is effectively decided.
Slightly tangential question: Why doesn't the government "own" the intellectual property for their citizens to vote?
I'm all for free markets and capitalism, but I think its not clear to me why some fundamental responsibilities and operations of the government can be contracted out. Is there a way this make sense to anyone?
Joseph Stalin said some version of "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."
(Mixed rating, according to Snopes.)
'I care not who casts the votes of a nation, provided I can count them,' Napoleon failed to remark." — New York Times editorial (26 May 1880) [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1880/05/26/archives/imperialism.html
Snopes has this as mixed because Stalin may or may not have expressed this sentiment at some point, but it seems impossibly unlikely to me that this pun works in Russian as it does in English.
Maybe we should just go back to the old school way? It seems like there have been grievances about voting machines for so long and it causes distrust to the entire system. The whole hanging chad issue in the 2000 election is a prime example.
I still think the California system is the best currently available:
Votes are recorded by filling in the dots on a scantronic ballot form.
The form is scanned and the votes are tallied electronically.
The original paper ballot is archived, and can be re-scanned (or hand counted) if a recount is required.
This combines the best of both worlds: speed and accuracy of electronic tally, and the original hand-filled paper ballot is retained as a record.
Five weeks to count the ballots is a model system?
https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-certified-elect...
This is less about technology than it is about process. Specifically:
1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election. 2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.
Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.
I cant help but notice that most people who are of the opinion that everyone should vote on Election Day, in person, and on a paper ballot that is hand counted, also have an issue with tabulation taking time.
There's not one California system. Each jurisdiction inside California picks its own system out of those which are certified.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ovsta/frequently-requested-...
For example, LA uses Ballot Marking Devices.
Most states use optical scan tabulators:
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state
That's excellent! and I would expect that this tech is not vendor captured by patent or other means.
Which means many companies can make the equipment/systems...
Can somebody point out the "MAGA Oligarch" link here? Scott Leiendecker is a former Republican election official, and the linked article says the company is "repped by" (presumably a PR agency?) that uses Trumpian imagery, but that seems to be the extent of the connection.
(I know that already might seem a lot to some people, but I was wondering if there was anything to justify the title beyond that.)
If there was no fraud, and all the recent elections were secure then this wouldn’t matter.
My contention has always been that until we see the basis of identity secured like Estonia/CAC/PIV/Passports through strong identity proofing and robust processes, we are not ready to talk about the Pandora’s box that is voting machines.
This kind of federal identification is a non-starter in US politics due to the history of its, well, federalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_documents_in_the_Unit...
I think this is bad but..
given the money required it seems like it with always be one or the other that owns these? Maybe governments should own the machines (people would still complain)
disclosure, i am biased and think everyone should use paper.
In the U.S. each state runs their own part of the federal election.
In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.
I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.
Paper is great, paper is scalable. It's also easy to understand.
Don't the vast majority of states use paper ballots? I don't know of any regular citizen that wouldn't agree.
We use paper in Australia and generally have a result by the next day (2010 being an exception due to hung parliament). We also have a very strict chain of ownership and auditible vote counts ledgers, if they're really looking for anti-fraud measures they could come and observe our AEC
You're right, there is absolutely no reason to use voting machines. Elections in other countries work perfectly fine with paper ballots.
Other countries tend to have only one or two contests, which makes counting easier. In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan. You can still have high confidence in this case if you do a risk-limiting audit.
> In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan.
Then hire 100x the number of poll workers as are needed in other countries. The cost is still trivial relative to the importance.
IIR, the US's huge push to (computerized) machine voting was after the 2000 election, when Florida's Democrats demonstrated just how badly they could screw up with paper ballots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".
With the amount of crime done by the current administration it seems they're pretty sure they're going to win future elections, if they're even held.
like what
> This is investigative journalism with no bosses, no advertisers, no filters.. just the raw truth about power and those it crushes.
Hard to take this statement serious when all the headlines in this substack echo leftwing bias. At least be intellectually honest about your intent.
Do you seriously think your comment is intellectually honest?
I wonder if the author shared the same concerns when they were under Dem control.
What Facebook meme did you learn that from?
Staple Street Capital's leadership is full of--get this--capitalists who have donated to both parties.
10 years ago, this wouldn't be a concern at all. I feel like something changed inside the US government since then. Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian who previously tried to manipulate an election became president, and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from, bought a voting machine company.
Ugh - OK, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve in this thread.
I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.
From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.
I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:
> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian
Agree. No notes.
> who previously tried to manipulate an election
I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
> became president,
Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.
> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,
A couple of points here.
First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.
We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.
> bought a voting machine company.
Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?
> I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
It was almost certainly Trump's intent to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I do not see why else he and his personal lawyers would go through such convoluted efforts to do all of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Trying to intuit Trump's state of mind is always a funny game that is played when discussing whether or not he lost the 2020 election, but you often end up with two possibilities: 1. Trump is a sane person who is lying about the results of the 2020 election to rile up his base (very plausible) or 2. Trump is a delusional person who willfully ignored the advice of his Vice President and Attorney General (less plausible, but even more highly concerning given this person was voted into office twice).
> First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
One note: I don't think this is right. Trump did very-swiftly take over the party, but not because of Obama and Biden. Republicans and Republican-friendly rich dudes and organizations deliberately built up a propaganda machine after Nixon, and that machine molded an electorate very far right with the aim of ensuring they'd always vote against Democrats—but to support a party that shared very little of their cultivated electorate's far-right aims.
I have also spent a lot of time in red areas and come from a mostly-red family, and typical Republican politicians from Reagan on traditionally have talked a pretty unconvincing game and really just run a pro-(big, monopolist)business/pro-rich party when in office. They could depend on their captive electorate because they'd convinced them the democrats wanted to give illegal immigrants jobs grabbing Republican voters' guns while funding their free abortions with taxpayer dollars and handing the US government over to the UN or something (this is, for readers not familiar with this crowd, a glib presentation but not really an exaggeration of the kind of thing these folks really do worry will happen when Democrats get in office, and probably the least-accurate part of that passage is that Republicans might think Democrats would give illegal immigrants jobs rather than just tons of free money to illegally-vote for Democrats or something like that—that this stuff hasn't happened when Democrats have gotten in office doesn't seem to register as meaningful to them, for some reason)
Trump started talking like a Republican voter, not a Republican politician. "Why don't they just build a wall?" "What does NATO do for us?" "Why don't we just ship illegals out wherever we find them, the constitution doesn't apply to them, probable cause doesn't apply, et c." (dip a toe in social media outside left-wing bubbles and you'll see a truly alarming amount of stuff like that latter sentiment) and disturbing support for military action in "lawless democrat cities", "democratic politicians are all constantly doing crimes up to and including secret murders, we should prosecute all of them"—this is shit their media has been telling them is true and good for decades, Trump's just the first option they've had who's crazy enough to act on any of it. You could hear it on AM radio in the '90s, you could overhear it in a rural diner in the '00s, no problem. This is who their voters are, and have been since before Obama, before Biden, and even before Trump.
He took the party over by exploiting a weakness the party itself had spent enormous resources and decades developing in cynically seeking a powerful tool against the Democrats. Their plan worked really well, but left them vulnerable to the first person positioned to credibly claim to want to do all the stuff Republican voters have been told they should want, but denied by their Republican politicians (because a whole bunch of the ideas are wasteful, insane, totally pointless, or extremely dangerous to democracy or the rule of law, so, to economic stability)
For people who have lived decades in red America before Trump, when he started talking, I think a lot of us saw he was dangerous pretty fast. Not because he was saying crazy shit we'd never heard before, but because he was saying crazy shit we'd heard all the time.
I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :)
I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. Trump and his admin are emboldened, and what little resistance there was to domestic actions just… dissolved.
> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right.
I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.
I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored.
It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.
Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.
Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win.
There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
When were the voting machines under Dem control?
Or is this a new version of whataboutism, were you invent "facts"?
No-one is truly neutral in this scenario. The previous owners Staple Street Capital are headed up by a bunch of guys from The Carlyle Group. Harvey Schwartz, CEO of the Carlyle Group was a big Biden guy.
Oh yeah, and that's why the Democrats were able to win full control of Congress, the Senate and the presidency...
Wait
Ignoring your snark, there has been more than one election under Dominion.
This poster didn't invent the "facts". The "facts" get invented elsewhere, and they just repeat them.
Whataboutism is a fallacy ... and that never was the case.
Blatant whataboutism is whataboutism, and is fallacious.
It is not "whataboutism" to expect people to apply standards fairly.
Democrats want people to vote. Republicans want to stop people from voting. There is minuscule numbers of people who voted when they shouldn't have. There is massive numbers of people who can't vote despite having the right.
Your whataboutism and bothsidesism is something you invent to make yourself feel good. It has no relationship with reality and it is destroying your country and your mind.