Posted on 03/29/2025 6:04:46 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
President Donald Trump’s new executive order on regulating elections is striking for the way it asserts broad powers for the executive branch that go far beyond what’s prescribed in the Constitution or sanctioned by courts. Experts expect the order to face legal challenges for that reason.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
But what’s also striking about the order is how it seeks to dictate some arcane details of the way voting systems work in some of America: Specifically, it bans the machine-readable barcodes or QR codes that are sometimes printed on ballots to help speed up vote counting.
Trump framed this move as a return to secure, paper-based voting. But in reality, the vast majority of Americans already use paper-based systems to vote, and barcodes and QR codes are an integral part of some of those systems. Getting rid of them as quickly as Trump envisions could create confusion, hassles, and steep costs for the jurisdictions that use them, which include some of America’s largest cities. It would slow down vote counts, and wouldn’t necessarily improve their accuracy.
So the language of the Trump order naturally raises questions about how barcodes and QR codes are used in our voting systems, and why the administration is directly targeting these codes as an urgent threat to election security and integrity.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Yes, this mail-it-in voting garbage has to go. So does early voting. It’s not only rife for fraud but, what if you die? What if the candidate dies?
If people 200 years ago could manage to get to polls, on a certain day, and mark some kind of ballot, I think we can all manage to get our spoiled selves to a poll on a day long pre-determined.
I had never heard of “Votebeat”, so looked it up...
Just another “left of center” “news outlet”.
The fact that it was quoted by MSN was the first clue.
FAKE NEWS.
May be fake news but one fact stands out
Americans already use paper-based systems to vote, and barcodes and QR codes.
Like 2020 results
Republicans do it to themselves. There was no reason to have social security brought up with DOGE at this time. Work on every department first. There plenty of work to do before closing a few offices and shutting down the phone system. Republicans do this every time especially before midterms.
I still don’t understand why the notorious “butterfly” ballot was discontinued when during the 2000 vote count, the media educated the voting public on how it was designed and how to fill it out correctly.
My first thought is it reduces ballot exclusivity. I guess Trump want to return to the ways of the 1960 election? You, know the one with no claims of voter fraud.
believing the lies
Them: Trump lies, Republicans lie…
Me: lies about what, specifically…..
Them: Lies about everything, you know….
No. Rational. Thought. With liberal women, it’s still about abortion, and I’m living in a state (CO) where there are no restrictions including due date of birth.
Covid boosters seven times because, you know, it’s important. So says The NY Times .
If it’s true, I agree with him. It’s no longer a secret ballot.
When I was in HR, we were in charge of “anonymous” employee surveys. A couple of people asked me if they truly were anonymous, I asked if they had noticed the bar code. ‘Nuf said.
They could identify an employee’s responses.
That’s why the left is fighting this. That’s how they win, I’m sorry “win”
Your cell phone will decode and display all QR codes.
Quote of the day!
> We used to know election results within hours, rather than days, weeks or months, of the polls closing as well.<
FTA “ It would slow down vote counts, and wouldn’t necessarily improve their accuracy.”
Slowing down vote counts is a ridiculous argument when it takes some blue areas months to count votes with all of the fancy gadgets.
EC
The people at the polling place do not make any record of which ballot you take; and, the randomness of people leaving the ballot machines to deposit ballots break sequence.
I work at election time as a precinct chairman. This isn't a feature I've seen come up before, which makes me suspicious of it.
The object of an honest election is liberty. That requires transparency about what the ballot says, but secrecy about who filled it out. This is so political opponents can't be rounded up and, say, shot.
A machine can read a vote on a ballot, that's no problem. But there's no reason I know of to have a vote cast on a ballot that the human eye can't read. That's when someone or some thing can replace a ballot with one that's coded to be read by a machine as a vote for one candidate while the voter has filled it out for a different one.
The key is to control by obvious, opposing-side sign-offs of everything BUT the vote, every step of the way, from printing to shipping to distribution to voting to counting to reporting. That way, if anyone tries to bring bias into the proceedings, an objective red flag goes up, and the clown gets arrested.
The vote has to be transparent. The human behavior handling it is what must be controlled and easily verifiable by both sides to keep it honest.
Totally agree. Delay in the process invites manipulation along the way.
“Slowing down vote counts is a ridiculous argument”
No kidding. The article is full of bull crap like that. It seems to conflate “ballot” with “envelope” for starters.
A barcode is a machine readable representation of data. Itis not a font.
If there was a unique identifier on each ballot, none of that would matter.
Every ballot should be scanned and made public, with a unique barcode, so the public can audit votes online, to check their own votes and find fraud patterns.
We should also do the purple thumb ink.
Perhaps you assume they are going to print each ballot before handing to the voter? A serial number is used to verify the authenticity of a ballot, not identify who used it. There would have to be a mechanism in place to record an association between the voter and the ballot.
Please tell me how you think that could be done, given what you have observed at the polls.
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