If there is one thing that that orange coloured racist cussjack, Donald J Trump, has got right in his knavish rants, it is that the United States voting system is utter garbage. There aren't enough cuss words to describe how bad it is at every single point.
When I saw this on social media, and found out that this kind of thing was happening in 43 states, I was horrified.
I have to admit that from the outset that my area of expertise is not working with computers. While I do know how to scribble electronic circuits, and write code in some programming languages, as I am not specifically an IT person, generally speaking that whole realm of tech professionals will view both me and the rest of us as luddites. Here's the fun thing, at the same time, they perfectly well know that selfishness propels people to steal from banks, hack into secure networks, and disrupt things for no other purpose than sport. Billions of dollarpounds are spent all over the world on cyber-security because while tech professionals view us commonfolk as uneducated scum plebs with out fingers up our noses, they know very well that electronic systems can and will be broken.
This is why I find it ludicrous that any kind of electronic voting should be allowed at all; much less be employed in the election of the most powerful person in the world. I don't care how secure you think that your electronic voting system is, or however fancy you think your blockchain system is, the political motivation to either disrupt or discredit an election is the size of global geopolitics; which means that tech professionals are either delusional, blind, stupid, evil, or any combination of those things. As I write this on November 4th and with the US Presidential Election (and a bunch of other elections) on November 5th, I already anticipate that if Donald Trump doesn't win the election, then people will accuse the system of being rigged and given that nation's predilection for murder, people will be killed.
There are three main elements that an election of this kind must fulfil:
The election must be Anonymous.
The election must be Verifiable.
The election must be Reliable.
Anything, yes anything, that weakens this at any point in the system, is bad.
I also have to preface this by saying that I live in Australia. We have in person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box which is taped and secured on election day. During the count, the boxes of ballots are opened in front of scrutineers and ideally with representatives from the interested parties to oversee the count.
Not only are the votes Anonymous, as they are on paper they are Verifiable; they are also Reliable as if there is a problem with the count, the whole count can be restarted again if necessary. Australian Elections meet the three most important elements.
I do not care if in person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box, are archaic. Being technologically advanced or even quick are irrelevant in an election. If you do not get the final results in one night then too bad. If you are a man-baby who has a whinge because you do not get the final results in one night then maybe you need to change your adult diapers and have a lie down.
In person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box, are a voting process which has been tried and tested for hundreds of years. Yes there are flaws such as the physical destruction of ballots, or the stuffing of extra ballots into boxes and even despite this, we know the flaws and we know the defenses. Even if we assume that the election is being tampered with from the outside, in person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box, are excellent, because those attacks are not scalable. At the last general election in Australia, there were 151 electorates and more than 6000 polling places. Even if there was a conspiracy to tamper with the election, it would have to be so massive and so well organised, that it would be too big not to notice. At any rate, even if there was a polling booth, or a seat which was suspected of being tampered with, we could hold a by-election.
In person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box, are anonymous. Votes where it is possible to identify who cast the ballot, are discarded. Even when gentleman's sausages are drawn on ballot papers while it may be vulgar, is not possible to identify who cast the ballot. Having said that, the idea that you can hold in person caucuses where you have people in a room vote by a show of hands, fails as it is not anonymous; even though it is reliable.
At every step down the line, every single electronic process, even if it is just to telephone the results, is a weakening of the process. If you have an any kind of electronic voting machine, there is no guarantee to the voter that the machine will record their vote accurately, or even at all for that matter. Even if an electronic voting machine offers the voter a receipt, there is no guarantee to the voter that the machine will record their vote accurately, or even at all for that matter.
If it is an old machine or a computer that hasn't been updated, then there is no guarantee to the voter that the machine has accurate software, or can't be tampered with from the outside by a USB Stick or other such thing. There is also no guarantee to the voter that the vote will be counted accurately at a central office, or subject to a man in the middle attack, or a DDOS attack, or myriad of other ways that people with nefarious designs have to tamper with the election.
Even if there is in person, on paper, anonymous ballots, which are deposited into a box, are anonymous, if there is an electronic counting process, then all you have done is transferred each and every possible method of attack one step down the chain; to where the public can't even see it. If there is an electronic counting process, for all purposes, it is exactly the same as electronic voting, just with the extra step of filling in a ballot instead of pushing a button.
Granted that if there is electronic counting with paper ballots, you could take random samples to estimate how accurate your system is, but if you're going to that effort all you've done is save counting time at the expense of the reliability of the system. It would have made more sense to count all votes by hand in the first place.
One of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to sow discontent at the results of the 2020 Presidential Election was precisely because electronic voting, or indeed any kind of machine voting, has always been a bad idea. Machine voting famously proved that it was neither Reliable nor Verifiable in 2000 with the so called "hanging chads" that were left behind after voting machines failed to punch through the ballot cards properly. Likewise in 2020, there was always reasonable doubt about the Reliability nor Verifiability of electronic voting machines like the ones supplied by Dominion Voting Systems Inc. That discontent was readily fermented because Donald J Trump is a orange coloured racist cussjack, who has actually has the power to persuade people to storm the Capitol Building and kill members of Congress. I have no doubt that as we have seen four more years of fermentation, that his supporters who are that way inclined can and would do it all again.
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