As someone not from the US I don’t know why you need janky machines with dodgy UI and touchscreen calibration. Why not just a pencil, you get your slip, put an X in the box next to your candidate. Works fine everywhere else…
It was an excuse for state legislators to give out no-bid contracts to companies they own stock in. It’s that simple. That’s the only reason they exist.
It worked fine here too until people realized it was another avenue for crooked income. The machines I once worked on stored data to pcmcia media. They worked fine. They didn’t need to replace them, but they did anyhow. Because money.
Some places, all the places I’ve been, give you the option. The machines are typically for people with bad vision because it makes everything easier to see. At the end of the day the machine just prints to the bubble sheet anyway and then that sheet is read by another machine.
I see this all the time with touch screens. People float their finger over the screen and end up selecting something.
Same, on a plane I saw a man become very frustrated trying to play essentially the airlines version of MapTap as everytime he’d touch somewhere on the map it would show that he selected Antarctica and give him 0 points. And that’s because his thumb/lower hand would always hit the bottom of the screen first and he never figured it out.
I posted this in the politics community They said don’t be a conspiracy theorist and removed the post. Is that community a bunch of right wing simps?
Getting banned from the politics community is just a right of passage on Lemmy.
That’s a big yikes. WSMV looks like a perfectly reasonable local news source based In Tennessee, and it’s not even owned by Sinclair!
This looks like local tech issues and not an attempt to steal an election. But with how openly Republicans have been saying they’re going to try something to ratfuck this election, and the amount of bullshit from LW politics mods, suppressing this story is not okay.
But with how openly Republicans have been saying they’re going to try something to ratfuck this election
You mean like this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/us/politics/justice-dept-alaska-senate-race-sullivan.html
Yeah. It’s kinda odd how feds didn’t get involved all those tines when it was a Republican intentionally trying to fuck with the Dem candidate.
They said don’t be a conspiracy theorist and removed the post.
Have you tried changing the headline from “Tennessee” to “North Korea” and just see if it slips under their radar?
Change Tennessee to California.
or tankies. they actually dont believe the election was rigged or stolen in the machines.
TN voter here. The poll workers are aware and on point. I was given a warning delivered in a very neutral tone. “Because there are so many options and the options are narrow some people have been noticing when they try to select an option it chooses the one above. Make sure the tip of your finger touches the candidate you are choosing. Double check the candidate you want is selected as a grayed box. Triple check the candidate you chose is showing on the review page. Quadruple check the candidate you chose is printed on the slip before feeding it into the counting machine. Come to us if the printed slip does not show the candidate you chose and we’ll spoil it and reset your vote.” Poll workers are heros.
Quadruple check the candidate you chose is printed on the slip before feeding it into the counting machine.
Europoor here: I thought you guys had actually digitalized the process. This just sounds like ticking a box on a piece of paper with a pen with extra steps.
Note that every state can differ.
In my case, it is a pen and paper, scanned by machine.
I don’t know if any state has gone full digital. That would preclude a manual recount, which I know is commonly a right of a candidate to request in a close result.
the conservative states, use voter mahcines much more pervasively than the non-conservative areas. paper ballots have always been more secure.
Well you can’t rig it as easily if you fill in the bubble with a pen. Use your brain for a sec, duh. You europeans just don’t GET us. /s
That’s exactly what it is.
But you see this way the state has to buy billions of dollars of machines.
and who owns these machines, gop backe dcompanies.
I’m glad my state doesn’t go in for this bullshit. Paper ballot filled out by hand.
Just like in cars, can we have physical buttons back? Touch screens shouldn’t be used for anything important.
And certainly not in cars.
So what makes this better than a pencil mark on paper?
Nothing. Americans getting ripped off by some company selling bullshit at the expense of their democratic legitimacy.
You can count the votes faster… but who cares about that when you can just take longer?
Likewise, electronic voting just introduces the doubt of legitimacy, even if voting is totally safe and legit.
Note that the paper ballots generally don’t take longer to count, they are generally digitally scanned in the same way the printouts from the touchscreen machines are.
It might speed up voting as a tap is a little faster than filling a bubble, but then again a wide tip marker would fix that, but then you might spoil more ballots when people aren’t sure if they mismarked it.
I guess but we still have pencils and teams of humans counting. I agree its the safest and easiest to audit.
Swapping a pen or marker could spoil a box if some funky ink is introduced.
Here in Sweden votes usually take about a week to finish counting, including re-checks and such. It’s not so bad.
What is bad is that we’re 40 days in and the government still hasn’t been established. Useless pieces of shit.
Pencil marks are prone to issues of stray marks, invalid choices (like choosing two candidates for a single office where you can only choose one), incomplete marks like where there’s only a dot (or ✖️ or ✔️) when you’re instructed to actually fill in the whole bubble. Many of these types of marking rules can invalidate an improperly marked ballot. And pencil marking is also subject to regular old mistakes, like when someone bubbles in the candidate other than their intended candidate, by following the row/table alignment incorrectly.
The ballot marking machine is helpful for making sure that the ballot generated isn’t invalid, and prevents certain categories of mistakes.
Well, for starters…
A hanging chad is a fragment from a punch-card ballot paper which has not detached fully, resulting in an incomplete and therefore invalid ballot paper. Punch-card voting machines require voters to punch holes in their ballot papers in order to indicate their voting preferences. The small discarded fragment of paper is called a “chad”. “Hanging chads” result when ballot papers are not completely punched through and the small piece of paper or card prevents the ballot paper from being marked down as a definite vote for a particular candidate.
Hanging chads were partly responsible for the unusually high proportion of invalid votes recorded in Florida during the 2000 US Presidential election. As Chads weren’t completely punched through, many ballot papers recorded people voting for fewer than the minimum number of candidates required. The US invested heavily in electronic voting methods such as voting machines, but still faces significant difficulties with elections.
Nobody mentioned punch card ballots.
Punch card ballots are supposed to be much better than pen/pencil and paper and that ended in disaster.
What the fuck do punch card ballots have to do with pen and paper?
Double-counting
That honestly sounds more like fucked up screen calibration than anything. If the machines are old as fuck, they likely still need that. People forget how shitty touchscreen tech used to be.
When it comes to republican election fuckery there are no coincidences.
There are other ways to mess with the counts that aren’t going to be visible to the person as they make selections. Like having it show whatever they’re selecting properly, then just printing different selections at the end. Not everyone is going to verify the printed copy shows what they selected, and already confirmed on the machine once.
Making it jump around on screen isn’t discreet at all, and it’s not the easiest way to try and interfere. Poorly calibrated touchscreens, and a user interface with inadequate spacing between options are much more likely reasons.
We’re used to using devices that companies spend a lot of time designing the User Experience on. Voting machines are a very niche industry, with virtually no consumer backlash for a shitty experience because the voter has no direct control, and the government isn’t going to be using that interface to handle things like counts at the end.
They are doing that too. They don’t care about discreetness.
I think the MAGAs are at the point where they don’t care if they are discrete because they know there will be no consequences for their corruption. News outlets will forget about it after a day, if they even report it. Democrats will send a strongly worded letter and forget about it. If any part of the justice system that still has integrity (increasingly rare) gets involved, Trump will just pardon them. The People might hold a protest or two, but they won’t do anything that actually threatens power.
This happened a few elections ago. Always favored Republicans for some reason.
This has been happening ever since I can remember and I’m 40. Paper ballots need to be mandatory in all states and the vote counting software should be open source.
It’s fucking insane that we allow private companies to hide their code from us.
That depends on if it’s happening to both parties or only happening to one party for some reason…
Wouldn’t be hard to game.
Just use a scheme where it selects the closest candidate to the “touch”, then offset the calibration such that it thinks a touch on #2 is #1. Then tapping on #1 will still select #1 because it’s the closest, while tapping #2 will select #1 because the tap thinks it’s closest to it.
So if the Republican candidate is always #1, then I’d bet it’s deliberate. Actually, all it needs is for the Democratic candidate to be #2 to split the Democratic vote, though then it runs the risk of splitting the Republican vote as well (assuming the “miscalibration” is linear, if it’s non-linear, then it could get “more correct” the further along the screen it goes).
If it was unintentional, you’d expect to see no specific party benefiting from the errors overall. Ie, in some locations it favours red, some blue, and in others one of the other candidates. Though even with this, if the distribution ends up such that it favours blue in blue strongholds and red in battleground areas, then that’s still fishy.
Seems like a good reason to maybe have random ordering? Then it would need to be reading the content to be able to properly change things instead of something a little less obvious like screen calibration.
Absolutely, then you could do statistical analysis on the positions to see if any position is biased (for or against) and detect the problem and recalibrate the screen and no one candidate would gain that much of an advantage (well, candidates that weren’t going to get many votes would benefit, but not to the point where they’d be able to steal an election).
But that assumes they are being run in good faith.
Easier to press the old resistive screen with a coin than with a finger. lol
Pretty sure they solved this problem back in the 1960s with a pen that can be used on a screen.
The general public would have forgotten how to use this highly advanced equipment by now, sometime after the first few iPhones. :( :(
Such things are FoR TeChNiCaL pEoPLe now.
(Sorta satirical, mostly genuinely sad.)
I mean, they solved it by showing you which option you selected before you moved to the next screen.
I tried looking to see if you can request a paper ballot in Tennessee but keep getting results for absentee ballots. Are you not allowed to request a paper one?
The machine prints a paper ballot, which you then feed into a counting machine. The voting machine itself doesn’t actually store any of your votes after you have sent your selections to the printer. This allows them to preserve a hard copy for recounts, and also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections before they feed it into the counting machine.
do you know why they don’t just print the ballot and put a big circle for somebody to mark with a sharpie?
seems to work great up here in Canada… very straightforward experience
I mean, any teacher who has ever used a scantron for their tests will know that “fill only one bubble per entry” is difficult for a surprising percentage of the population. Plus, if someone makes a mistake on a paper ballot with a sharpie, they need a whole new ballot.
We have paper ballots in Oregon and it isnt a problem. Unlike a scantron, the ballot is 5x the size with 5x fewer options so it isn’t crammed full of little tiny bubbles to pencil in. They also print on the ballot instructions for what to do if you select the wrong bubble (cross out the bubble with an X and fill in the correct one), so that isn’t a problem either.
It seems people in this thread are just giving cover to shitty practices and election fraud under the guise of “I can invent a problem in my mind therefore it’s an actual problem and why these deceptive practices must exist.”
Thanks for reminding me to read the voters guide on the Max later today!
hanging chads… shudder
any teacher who has ever used a scantron for their tests will know that “fill only one bubble per entry” is difficult for a surprising percentage of the population.
Yeah, but they’re dealing with kids.
You would hope that an adult who is competent enough to be voting should be able to accomplish such a simple task.
Ah, I see you’ve never worked in front end customer service, food service, or retail
right, but scantrons are small and ballots are big. it’s not that difficult to spoil a ballot and get a new one
idk, my experience as a voter and my understanding of how it goes through discussion with my parents and their friends who have worked the polls many times makes it seem like the process is pretty okay, overall
I’ll have to remember to bring the topic back up in the upcoming elections
What kind of idiot (or compromised) developer wouldn’t put the selection boxes as far away as reasonably possible from each other on the screen?
What fuck we fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a machine. Have never had to vote on a digital machine. In Oklahoma just so you know. Wonder how many people vote went to wrong person.
If someone from the past saw this they’d just assume humanity evolved into clowns. Which isn’t even wrong.
Damnit big balls, is their no end to your crimes!
That face when even with rigging the machines they still loose.
Bunch of loosers.
I mean, you’re really underselling the ability for these people to rig elections.
I would not be surprised to see a bunch of the Deep South states with heavily diverging exit polls and final results. Then we’ll get an earful about polling being unreliable and an even bigger earful about how anyone doubting election results is a Russian PsyOp.
Hell yeah, but also you can lose that “o”
Dyslexia is a cruel mistress.
Seems like most people skipped “lose” day at school.
they still loose (lose)
That remains to be seen. Our system is not secure from fascist fuckery and that has become increasingly clear over the last decade.
Sow doubt and suspicion. Claim fraud, steal election. Martial law the riots, fascism.
And bigots.
You needed three more syllables.
This bug will get fixed before the election. It’s supposed to flip to the GOP candidate AFTER the submit button is pressed and without the voters knowledge.
or when the paper ballot somehow is either missing or not counted.
In Canada we don’t even use machines. Just mark an X and count the papers you rubes.
Literally. Elections is the one thing I don’t trust with digitalisation.
Just the one?
No, more. I wouldn’t have nuclear codes digital either. I wouldn’t want ChatGPT to get ahold of them and make a whoopsie with a “You right, I did a mistake there eradicating Angola. Here’s what happened.”
(the following is a joke extension written by my own two fleshy thumbs. It is not real slop.)
Edit: Can’t leave an awful thing alone. Moar emdashes and emojis! Is it believable yet? Lol
((NORADGPT is typing. . .))"I called the wrong tool by mistake, using my knowledge, abilities, and superior intellect. And honestly? That’s not a ‘Crime against humanity.’ That’s real strength.
(bullet points after “What is a Angola?”)
- ✅ According to multiple sources online — They had it coming. (link to a few .info sites nobody’s heard of)
- ✅ You can put something else there now — A Burger Zone or a Home Warehouse or just “More America”! — And honestly? I’d call that winning. 🦅🫡🇺🇸🛒🛍️ (Disclaimer: names of companies might be incorrect.)
- ✅ Lots of mineral resources 💎💎📈📈📈.
- ✅ Beach front property will get MUCH more affordable 🤑.
Why you might not like my decision:
- ❌ People were there — Generally this will be seen as a con if you are one of those, and nuclear detonations are known to be harmful to them. 🚀☢️☠️
- ❌ The radioactive fallout will likely drift across the planet — We can delve into the effects of that if you like.🚀☢️☠️
- ❌ The detonation of a nuclear warhead🚀 likely triggered multiple self-defense launches 📡 from other nuclear-armed countries —Depending on where you and they are located, they could reach you anywhere from within a few hours to mi_
(CONNECTION INTERRUPTED. PLEASE REFRESH.)
Sigh, the simpler days of hanging chads…
Which was also stupidly complex. Just mark a fucking x
Complex because they were stealing an election.
Aww shoot. This X is next to the name, not the circle.
This person made an x, then lined out the name and put an X on another candidate.
This X is actually just a /
Add a photograph to the mix for 8x mult.
And if one photograph or chad isn’t enough, hire a showman to take another one for you. Number go up.
Same in civilized states in the US. Mark by hand, counted by machine, and recounted by hand if necessary.
The funny part is these voting machines actually just send your selections to a printer, which creates a hard copy with the corresponding bubbles filled in next to your selected names.
Then you feed that printed ballot into a counting machine. And the counting machine is just a fancy scantron reader. The point of the printer is that it creates a hard copy which can be counted by hand for recounts. It also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections (and ask a poll worker to invalidate their vote and let them start over if anything is incorrect) before they actually feed it into the counting machine.
I have two questions about this:
-
Why do Americans use these machines? Just turn up at the polling station, confirm your name and address, get handed your ballot paper, mark it with an X, drop it in the box. Bish bash bosh.
-
What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!? Just speak normally.
America, more than ever, varies a lot by state.
I’m from New England. I vote in person because it’s fast and easy. In my urban town, everyone lives within a 5-10 minute walk of their polling location. There is never a line and it takes like 2 minutes tops. It’s a paper ballot, fill-in-the-bubble style. I had to vote absentee once: I swung through town hall and took care of it in like 15 minutes - same deal except it went in a signed and sealed envelope.
1 - so someone could make money off selling them
2 - probably thanks to radio news and a stylistic choice that took hold
If you’ve ever had to grade a scantron test, you would know how hard “fill in the little circle completely, and only fill in one circle per question” is for the general population.
Eh. Big difference in motivation between high schoolers taking a test and adults voting. Also, the circles on the ballots are larger and spaced farther apart.
it seems to work just fine here in Canada
In many countries automated counting is not a thing. All interested parties gather in a room and manually count it.
The “News Reporter Voice” is actually an Ohio accent. Or rather, the distinct lack of an accent. Add in proper enunciation while projecting calm authority, and BAM! that Ohio non-accent turns into the News Reporter Voice.
There’s no such thing as a lack of an accent. All that means is “it’s the same accent as me”. To a Brit, someone from Ohio has an extremely thick American accent, what with all the rhotic Rs and such.
well, I mean, it’s a lack of any specific American accent. They don’t sound like they’re from the Appalachia, West/East coast, or Boston, or the south etc. etc. A lot of American television news reporters came from Columbus, Ohio back-in-the-day because we just don’t have a regional dialect.
What I said still applies in the context of American accents. There’s nothing that makes Ohio’s accent the base from which others deviate. It’s literally just the one you happen to be the most used to hearing. To someone who grew up in rural West Virginia, your accent is quite noticeable, and their neighbors just talk normally. To them, everyone but them has an accent. Yours isn’t special in any way.
They don’t sound like they’re from the Appalachia, West/East coast, or Boston, or the south etc. etc.
No, they sound like they’re from Ohio.
No, I mean, the “radio announcer” and thus the “news reporter” voice was modeled after the Ohio accent, because it was seen as a non-accent. You’re right that we have one, it’s just so incredibly bland, that it comes across as not one at all.
Here’s an article that goes into further detail
Vizetelly, who established a school for announcers at CBS, was concerned with maintaining the “purity” of American English. In his mind, the Midwest was the place to be—and Ohio in particular.
Vizetelly and other educators felt that broadcasters could evoke trustworthiness and objectivity by imitating the speech of the “heartland.” Eventually, when radio announcers and TV journalists began sounding like they were from the Midwest, the “broadcaster’s dialect” became understood as normal.
Ah. I’ll grant that because it’s an accent that guy liked, it became a prevalent accent in news and popular media.
I’d still push back on it being bland, since that’s still just familiarity. Someone who grew up in rural Appalachia without electricity hearing it for the first time would find it quite thick and probably make fun of it and find ways to exaggerate it.
Because that voice and cadence is how you know that I’m telling the truth…and am REALLY important. BruisedMoose, piefed.social. Back to you la508.
What the fuck is with that weird “news reporter voice” they always do on American news!?
RIGHT?! It’s quite bizarre. Maybe it’s some kind of standard for maximum clarity or something. It annoys me too, just like “commercial voice.”
Not all states use voting machines, it’s a state by state thing. The news voice I think is something they are trained in. It might be a holdover from the radio days and the “trans-atlantic” accent.
We do it correctly in Washington State. We get our ballot in the mail, mark it at home, and stick it in a mail box or ballot drop box. It’s amazing, and I remember being baffled when I learned voting in person wasn’t obsolete.
With no ID checks?
You need a valid state ID or SSN to register. Can register online, by mail or in person.
If you get an EDL you are automatically registered.
Easy peasy.
Despite republican claims to the contrary, you do actually need proper ID to vote.
That “news reporter” voice has gotten steadily worse over the years. I stopped watching news of any kind a long time ago partially because of how annoying that voice and cadence was. Every time I see any news reporting now it’s all I can do not to take to the TV (or whatever) with a baseball bat. I can’t take it seriously at all and it’s so SO much worse now.
It’s getting right up there with “Hurried excited yet clear but stress-inducing YouTube-bro you’ve got to see this you won’t believe it” voice. ARGHH.
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Flubbed executions, panic banning Kratom over Facebook posts, broken voting systems. Tennessee is the new Mississippi.
the gop is completely driven by Social media algorhitims.
There are very good reasons to ban Karatom that aren’t related to panicking or Facebook posts.
Such as?
They did it because alcohol sales were falling. Mushrooms and pot loopholes were also closed.
I don’t consider moral panic a good reason
Dont forget “state police arresting hundreds of sober drivers for DUI in order to hit DUI quotas.”
Funny how it never flips for Dems.
See, that’s pure coincidence and has nothing to do with manipulation. But if it would flip for the Dems, then it would be 100% Biden’s fault. Who is probably not even American, but from Ghana. And has very poor approval ratings.
*This depends entirely on your reality bubble dictated by preferred news source.
I’m sure the talk radio blowhards are reporting exactly this, that the machines are flipping to those wiley and dastardly liberals, but their side will win anyway because everybody loves them and their emperor and everybody thinks they’ve never done better than they are right now.
Voting machines are FORCING people to Vote for Republicans DESPITE what they ACTUALLY Pressed? Sounds like TRANSGENDERS and MEXICAN KIDS are commiting VOTER Fraud!
-LITERALLY Republicans!
Lol
huh
That went over your head huh? Pretty damn funny
To me, this reads as a software bug.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
Electronic voting is extremely scary to me because it is a black box that collects and counts the votes.
It would be trivial to display everything properly, but record a different result in the background, or simply at the end change a number of votes to make a faked result seem belivable.
Note however that I have no proof of that happening and I am not claiming that any voting machine is actually doing this. I am simply explaining what I believe is a possible danger of using computerized voting.
That is why there is usually a printed paper ballot that goes along with it. That allows you to verify your vote was cast properly, and allows for recounts and audits if the electronic count is questioned.
That is a good first step, but removes one critical function of an election, secrecy.
You need voter secrecy to avoid voting coercion by a third party, that only works if they can find out what you actually voted for.
The printed ballot shouldn’t be tied to you. It prints out of the machine when you vote. You check that it is accurate, then drop it in a box. Secrecy is maintained, an auditabke paper trail exists, and as long as chain of custody for the ballots is maintained it should remain accurate.
Though with so many organizations being coopted by fascists, and independent election observers are being denied, there is a lot of room for fuckery.
Unless people lie about the ballot. Or they are thrown out. I’m sure there’s a digital version of hanging chads.
Bitflips
There is! It’s a joker in the hit indie game Balatro.
Yeah because we know after the votes are picked up, there* definitely won’t be any paper ballots missing or wrongly counted. You people are in la la land.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
Ok, so the point of the machine is to generate a ballot?
Seems like it would be easier to just skip the machine…
The machine allows a digital recording that can be tabulated faster than physically counting the paper ballots.
The paper ballots should still be the official votes and counts, but the machine means faster preliminary results.
Digital-only voting is an issue because there is no backup paper trail, and could easily be compromised without any visible indication.
There is no reason for the voting machine to know a name or display anything identifying. You should be verified separately before getting close to a machine to vote. It should be as dumb as possible. Only tabulating your selections and printing the result for you to verify then drop into the official box.
Nah, you do both. A fast electronic count then a slow paper count. That way you get the advantages of both systems.
Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.
I’m amazed at the American obsession with voting machines. A properly organised hand count has an amazingly low error rate. I distinctly remember an article about 20 years ago stating, that even the then newest scanning vote counting machines had an error rate higher than hand counting.
Yes “a human” makes mistakes. But multiple humans paying attention at the same time and also keeping each other honest do a tremendously good job.
that is why conservative depend on the mahcines, they are known to have an error rate that somehow only benefits republicans.
I’m reasonably sure that the “hanging chads” was only a problem for counting votes for candidates from one of the two parties.
I’ve heard a legend that in a Scottish parliament election, which claims that a ballot is required only to show “clear preference” that a person drew dicks on all but one candidate, over which was written “not a dick”. The vote was counted as it showed clear preference.
The point is, people determined on a particular outcome will find novel ways of ensuring that outcome.
There are other types of paper ballots.
Here in Sweden you take a ballot from the party you want to vote for, you mark any specific representative if you want, you put the ballot in an envelope, seal it, walk to the election official desk and cast your vote:
Eh. The entire state of Oregon gets by just fine without absolute ballot secrecy. And any other state that largely or to a significant degree exercises no-excuse vote-by-mail. Basically everyone in Oregon votes by mail. There are in-person voting booths at each county election office for the few oddballs that want to vote in person, but almost everyone votes by mail. It’s October 22. My ballot is already in. I’ve already voted. I filled out my ballot in my kitchen.
There was nothing physically preventing someone from forcing me to fill out my ballot the way they want to. There would be nothing physically preventing my employer from saying, “fill out your ballot the way you want in front of me, sign it, and then give it to be to turn in. If your refuse or cancel your ballot later, you’re fired.”
Yet that doesn’t happen. Why? Because we made it a serious fucking crime to do that. If I’m reading Oregon law right (I’m no lawyer), coercion of a vote that way would be a class C felony punishable for up to five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. And I’m less sure on this part, but I imagine that would apply to every single employee you coerced this way. So you’re risking a felony for ever single vote your coerce. That’s a huge risk for a single vote. It’s just not worth it. Some real morons might try it, but no one with two brain cells to rub together is going to give it a try. Plus any federal penalties.
apply to every single employee you coerced this way.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually considered the risk that an employer could force people to vote a certain way. I’m far more concerned about people living in abusive relationships.
we made it a serious fucking crime to do that.
People living in abusive relationship are already victims of serious crimes every day. Yet those crimes often go unreported for years, because the fear and control is so strong. I see no reason to believe that someone who is already controlling their partner with physical violence would balk at forcing them to fill out a vote a certain way before mailing it for them.
And yet it doesn’t happen. Could an abusive spouse do this? Sure. But again, it’s a huge risk for not a lot of gain. It’s one extra vote in exchange for a felony. It’s just not a serious problem the way domestic violence in general is.
You have to balance competing interests in law. Mail voting makes voting much more accessible, cheaper, and more resilient to manipulation such as closing poll locations in targeted precincts. And stretching election day over a few weeks gives people a chance to more easily correct errors that pop up, and makes the voter rolls more resilient to political ratfucking.
That huge increase in accessibility does come with a slightly increased risk of vote coercisiom, but it’s more than worth it.
We should be concerned about any sort of coercive control. Yes, children, elders, elders, and other vulnerable populations may need to be prevented from skipping proper nutrition, hydration, hygiene, and shelter, force and coercive control need delicate handling, where practical and possible. For instance, while proper nutrition is a noble goal and the sweeteners, oils and other questionable ingredients in a nutrition beverage may give us pause, that’s still preferable to ng tubes or force feeding.
It seems too obvious to be deliberate.
I’mma stop you right there.
Even just the information that the media gets to share with us illustrates pretty clearly that this administration and entire political movement behind it is a mix of violent idiots and slightly more self aware mustache-twirling villains who delight in taunting and torturing their victims once they are confident they’ve won.
And it’s not just sadistic sickness, it’s also a strategy. If the evening news shows government officials knowingly doing illegal and reprehensible things on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, while also reminding us that the police state is in full effect for everybody else, they think they are sending a message to regular folks that they cannot be touched and you’d best just keep your head down and not get any funny ideas. It’s literally just the Death Star “fear will keep them in line” strategy.
But at least the retort about a tighter grip meaning more systems/groups slip through their fingers is also accurate.
Fascism is not a good long term plan because it is rooted in selfish, short term goals of the few.
Evil’s most redeeming quality is that sooner or later, in will inevitably turn inwards against itself. We already see this happening quite often and lots of cracks are showing.
We need to press that advantage.
I’m not an electioneering expert or anything, but I’ve often thought that one way to get the best of both worlds would be to generate a unique one-way hash of a voter’s vote choices and essentially a private key (not 4). The hash could be publicly displayed to verify the final counts without revealing anything about the person behind the votes. The list of hashes for a candidate could be counted by everyone and anyone could verify that their hashes were listed under the correct candidates.
Then there is still the potential for an abusive partner or parent to get your hash and verify what you voted for.
An election is actually very complex to run while maintaining anonymity, security and transparency at the same time.
Not only that, it makes selling your vote actually feasible, since you have an easy way to prove who you voted for.
TBF, it’s legal to take a picture of your ballot now, so you can sell your vote in other ways.
No way to confirm the ballot you took a picture of is the one that went in the box though.
I don’t think they care about being obvious anymore. They know no one will do anything about it.
Fair point, by making it obvious you also demonstrate your power.
I don’t know how you’d come to this conclusion living in the world we live in today.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the right
You know, it would be an extremely interesting and informative exercise to hook a few of these things up to
rea(augmented with a digital camera and some rudimentary physical automation) to get to the bottom of all the fucky shit these companies have been doing for decades, as well as doing some more robust and direct statistical analysis of the behavior of these machines:- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-1
- https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/exploring-voting-equipment-and-inequality-2016-us-general-election-part-2
- https://news.engin.umich.edu/2024/10/four-election-vulnerabilities-uncovered-by-a-michigan-engineer/
- https://cssh.northeastern.edu/2024-election-results-under-scrutiny-as-lawsuit-advances/
The ownership and management of the companies that make these things is also very worth exploring:
- https://www.wired.com/story/scott-leiendecker-dominion-liberty-votes/
- https://apnews.com/article/cbc30e6a059a41ff8ba4d4da2f120f79
So, another route worth exploring (though this approach would require a lot more humans to get directly involved with social engineering and whitehat hacking) would be to basically get hired by these companies and find a way to exfiltrate data for the purpose of public viewing and analysis.
It’s furthermore worth noting that much of this could be answered if these companies open sourced the firmware and hardware specs of the systems they’re deploying, increasing public visibility and access in general (there are tons of VERY pervasively deployed and VERY secure pieces of software all over the world today - open source absolutely does not mean “insecure”, and in fact often leads to MORE secure software), but their ongoing insistence about being cloak and dagger about everything prevents any of that from happening.
A government contracted corporation couldn’t possibly be biased though!
…They just wouldn’t want any sneaky competitors to see their “small rounding errors.”
Lol sarcasm aside: Well said. If government is to serve the people, stuff such as this must be under the peoples’ scrutiny.
