I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
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That’s a really cool reply. Thanks for sharing!
I think the lawsuits throwing out mail in ballots for blue counties were far more harmful than “voting machine fraud”
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A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that’s not even the main problem.
If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.
It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn’t even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.
A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we’re talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.
And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they’ll never get the access to verify it themselves.
Even checking a ballot print isn’t foolproof. In a secret ballot system there’s nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.
Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine.
Stealing an election doesn’t have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.
As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That’s just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.
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Unironically, I think elections are one of the few scenarios where blockchain technology could actually be useful.
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Pen and paper works pretty well. Everyone who can read/write/count understand how it works and can be appointed as a political/citizen observer.
Moreover, if the count is public (not in the US but it’s the case where I vote) everyone can see the counting and get the number, all it takes is people having 2h to give to their country to help counting or just watch it.
This make fraud almost impossible
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2024 Election Results Under Scrutiny as Lawsuit Advances
Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court ruled in open court in May that the allegations were serious enough for discovery to proceed.
The lawsuit could renew debate about the 2024 election, though it won’t change the outcome since Congress has certified the results declaring President Donald Trump the winner.
It comes amid unconfirmed reports that voting machines were secretly altered before ballots were cast in November’s election. The federally accredited testing lab, Pro V&V, that signed off on “significant” changes to ES&S voting machines—which are used in over 40 percent of U.S. counties—“vanished from public view” after the election, according to the Dissent in Bloom Substack.
https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-lawsuit-advances-2083391
paper ballots
Just FYI, I think most, or at least every voting machine I’ve used in GA, actually prints a paper ballot that then is read by a machine (or maybe a human, not entirely sure).
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re immune to some sort of foul play. I always triple check my choices and triple check the printed ballot. But is there some sort of nefarious trickery in some machine readable only part of it? Perhaps. I personally don’t think there is, but who knows. I’d love to be proved wrong. I’d love to see the fascists suffer.
To be 100% clear, I don’t think there isn’t foul play going on, I’m just skeptical that it’s specifically in the voting/counting machines, but I haven’t also read up on the most recent of claims from the past few weeks about it.
Remember the hanging Chad fiasco? After that Congress appropriated money for a digital solution, but did literally no work to standardize or ensure ethics. So a bunch of shit companies bid bottom dollar and got the contracts.
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Wrong post, but you should be nicer.
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Each voting district sets its own methods; different areas have different laws. It’s a mess.
I remember my country using such machines for some elections before they were considered as incompatible with democracy. We vote on paper again, which is good.
Same here, we’re still voting on paper, and I hope that never changes without good reason.
100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult. In France voting is done entirely on paper and results are often released later that night, and almost all the results are in by the next day. Same in the UK, although it generally takes them a few hours longer, probably because the polls close later in the evening.
I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.
But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.
I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.
For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.
So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all
Is it just a sacred cow? “you can’t change anything about voting”? Or do they believe in some specific obstacle? I was discussing this with a friend recently, and the only guess as to why it wouldn’t work in America is that it requires a reasonable number of volunteers, and maybe Americans are too busy working insane hours and surviving to add civic responsibilities.
That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.
I have some fragments.
I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .
Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.
Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.
Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.
So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.
This is a way for the monied class to deflect criticism about the country’s various failures to improve the situation for their citizens. Like healthcare, when you suggest that you want to do it like they do it in, say… Scandinavia, you always get a wave of a hand and a vaguely worded “yes well, this country is just too big for that. <insert country here> can only get away with that because of their tiny, homogenous population.”
In California we’re all mailed paper ballots, which we can return by mail (no stamp needed) or designated ballot box, or in person at a polling place up to closing time on Voting Day. My ballot (in a westside Los Angeles district) had 37 items, (on about 7 pages iirc) some of which were yes/no on propositions, others of which had a choice between 2 to 15 candidates for various offices. From school board to US President. It was very clear, just needed a black pen to fill the circles, and I could have gotten it in a dozen different languages. It’s also accessible for my quadriplegic husband, who can’t get to a polling place. But it took time and thought. It wasn’t like the pictures I’ve seen of French ballots which were just a single name on a sheet of paper, take the one from the stack of your choice, I guess? So counting them takes more time. Plus counting ballots that were mailed and postmarked by the deadline, those are allowed 2 weeks to arrive.
*(A couple of edits to clarify details)
I heard Ireland does too, but they also use Rank Voice Voting so it takes them about a week. Seems like a potential benefit that the process of democracy is so visible, imo.
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Some places have hybrid machines; an electronic interface but gives you a printout of your choices (like a Scantron form filler). I’m fine with this option so long as hardcopies are preserved for 2 years minimum and randomized checks are performed before and after an election on EVERY machine.
Kansas has the hybrid style so I fill out a paper ballot and it is scanned and the results tabulated electronically with a paper trail for auditing. This actually seems even more reliable to me than only paper or electronic with printed out copies for a paper trail.
Same here. Paper ballots that can be machine scanned and stored for manual audits seem like the best possible method.
Trump’s Justice department just demanded all records on 2020 and 2024 federal elections from Colorado.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/11/nx-s1-5426097/trump-justice-department-voter-data-colorado
Where I live, we have voting machines with a paper receipt. Voters use a touchscreen and then get a printed ballot. The voter can then check to make sure that what they cast electronically is correct, and then the paper ballot is scanned and saved. You can perform an audit anytime you like to compare the instant electronic results to hand counted ballots.
Washington uses paper ballots absentee only and only needs more than a few hours to figure out results unless there’s a very tight race.
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Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones. No way one of the USPS employees, or a corrupt election worker, clerk, etc. would ever do anything wrong. If anything, our recent elections have shown us really people are infallible & honest, and it is computers that are inherently flawed.
It’s far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it’s all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it’s managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.
Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you’d need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you’d need them all to keep their mouths shut. That’s far more difficult than defeating a computerised system
It’s actually much easier, especially with mail-in ballots. Paper ballots can discarded, modified, etc. Many of them sit in election boxes that aren’t under reliable surveillance. The election workers, usually only two, come and put them into giant trash bags. They are not monitored at that point either, allowing them to modify the ballots. I haven’t seen any reliable checks of the envelopes at that point either, where if they’re opened & resealed, it wouldn’t even raise flags. You also have no way to confirm the tally of your vote to ensure it wasn’t manipulated. If you want to have multiple checks with multiple isolated computer systems, you absolutely can.
I for one, actually believe a blockchain ledger system of voting like that of Monero would provide a great option. Most of all, they could anonymously verify their vote which to me is the most important. Having some verification that my vote was actually calculated as casted is extremely important to me. Furthermore, you’d have top academics, mathematicians, cryptographers providing the exact details on its design with an open source solution that anyone could search & scan for vulnerabilities, meaning it would receive a significant amount of review & testing.
You also would have a huge amount of people like myself that actually understand the tech, and plenty of individuals willing to explain its design & safety in a format comfortable for you. It is a shame people are so opposed to new ideas & real progress, especially after Democrats just lost to Trump. I guess just keep what you’re doing & we’ll finally get a viable third party.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones
Correct. It is. Because to do enough to change the result you need to do it alot, and that’s really hard to get away with.
In Canada we count the ballots with witnesses (called scutineers) to validate.
I’m not sure if they called it a scrutineer but I used to volunteer at elections (US) and they did the same. The counters would sit at a long table with people watching from both sides. If I remember correctly, everyone had to stay until it was done and there was a sign-in/out sheet.
I understand that there’s more people voting for federal elections but it really didn’t take that long. Polling closed at 7 and the results/physical ballots were delivered to city hall by 10
In my case the scrutineers were volunteers from the political parties and didn’t have to stay if they didn’t want to, but I was a deputy returning officer and I couldn’t leave until the count of ballots matched the number of ballots I had given out to people.
All of this talk about election fraud is just power hungry psychopaths inventing reasons they lost. Large scale cheating with paper ballots is much harder than digital systems.
One difference I’ve seen between out elections is we have more polling stations. It’s unusual for people to wait longer than 15 minutes to vote.
We always have results that evening. Polls close at eight pm and results are finalized by midnight.
It might have been party volunteers here too, not sure as I was the “lowest level” of volunteer…
I think you hit the nail on the head with the amount of polling stations. Politicians of a certain party here really like voter suppression.
It’s gotta be a distraction from gerrymandering and other more provable fuckery
Yes. Exactly. Votes are counted accurately, and then carefully grouped (gerrymandered) to prevent public opinion from influencing the planned election outcome.
Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.
What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is
that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states
there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.
when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.
the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community
there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout
How are you going to implement managed democracy?
There’s also a difference, because our elections typically have only a few races on them. In other words, at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing. Typically four to six options.
In a us election, there can be a ballot containing choices for many different levels, including judges, district attorneys, and so on. Not to mention they might have several referenda on the same ballot too.
I could see that being much more complex on paper, making electronic voting attractive.
Still that’s a solved problem. You just use different color coded papers for each item that has to be voted on.
I really don’t get the US’s difficulties with paper votes. It’s so easy to understand literal preschoolers can understand it. I know because our children voted on meal choices in preschool every time an election happened in Germany.
It’s super transparent. You can just watch the counts or even count them yourself if you doubt them.
It’s fast. If you have enough voting districts counting takes an hour or two. Maybe a few more if you have a big district with many different issues to vote on.
Almost everyone can understand how it works. Even many literally mentally disabled people. I find this to be the most compelling argument for paper voting. You leave noone behind. It’s a super simple concept to grasp that reaches every citizen. But with electronic voting you need to have a degree in computer science to understand that it is not transparent at all what is happening inside the machine.
at the federal level I only vote for the candidates in my writing
I’m guessing you’re a Canadian that was using voice-to-text with your device’s language set to “US English”.
In American English, “writing” and “riding” sound the same. But not in Canadian English. Or British English, but for a different reason.
We did it cause money. And lobbying. Same thing.
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They switched to machines to that
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Its easier to create conspiracy theories about “stolen election” even when there isn’t.
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If you now rig the election, the losing side (who legitimately won before) will seem like conspiracy theorists for claiming fraud, even if the election was indeed stolen.
Congrats, the people are now fighting each other while the rich can use the ensuing violence as a pretense to enact more authoritarian laws!
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I guess it varies by jurisdiction. In my state we fill out paper ballots, then you just insert the ballot into a machine which records your votes and prints you a receipt.
I’ve honestly liked the systems we have in our county. They’re a digital system but you feed in a straight sheet and it reads your district. From there you select on a touch screen all of your selections and then print it out. You have a chance to review the ballot at that point to make sure everything is printed out right. You then slide it into another scanner which counts the votes and drops the ballot into a secured box, that way should they need to audit things you have a paper trail too.
