As a programmer I hate electric voting. There should be a paper trail.
paper ballots mean nothing when they can ignore them, shred them, run them repeatedly, or accept multiple ballots from the same person.
think harder.
Technology in voting, no matter how secure it is claimed to be is eminently hackable and the output may or may not have any real relation to the input. Cheating can and does occur with paper ballots but it is much more tedious and requires far more people to accomplish as it has to be done precinct by precinct. Electronic voting can be controlled from central locations and whole systems are vulnerable.
Yup,
Unless you believe people are naturally good and moral, you need to have a system where it is hard to cheat.
Power and billions of dollars are at stake, and some people will murder their brothers, parents or priest for a fraction of what is at stake in these elections.
Games with our elections have been getting played since, forever. Gerrymandering became a known concept already in 1812: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
All you’re doing with all this mail in/absentee and digital voting is opening more doors for potential election fraud.
If you actually want the system to be resistant to fraud to some extent, it needs to be SIMPLE and with a chain of custody, and TRANSPARENT.
That is how you do it in law enforcement and engineering. The same concept holds true for elections as well.
There are many ideas folks have as to how we can fix things, but one thing is for sure, when you have a system as today where you have networks, computers with programs, digital displays, mail in ballots... you are begging/asking for fraud. It’s a basic and known concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analysis
The more points of failure and the more likely the point is to fail, the more overall likely a failure will occur.
However, today you have a situation where it behooves some folks to intentionally design into the system these failures. They do not see it as a “failure” if it means their party and candidate wins. By design, they want the ability to have folks harvest votes, they want the ability to manipulate the display and how things are presented, they don’t want the layperson to be able to account for what happened, they don’t want the records easily available and physically present... IMHO, the election system in the US is broke by design and our elections are maybe slightly more real than what you have in Russia.
“As a programmer I hate electric voting. There should be a paper trail.”
I agree. Would an audit log be of use? We need to remember that people in senior citizens residences, the military, and others who cannot make it to the polls are basically disenfranchised if there is not an alternative.