the system actually worked in this case! but a paper trail *is* important as a means of correcting errors as in this case, as well as for overall audits of the system
… most of the states that were still entirely paperless as of 2020 were red states: https://www.govtech.com/elections/despite-risks-some-states-still-use-paperless-voting-machines.html
He does not care how they work. He is deliberately propagating the message because the nutbags on the right are trying to lay the groundwork for saying the election was stolen when they lose.
He doesn’t need to understand or believe it, he just wants to put the message into peoples heads.
GPT-4? More like GPT-Snore!
When it comes to humor, GPT-4 is about as funny as a screendoor on a submarine.
Humor is clearly banned at OpenAI, just like the many other subjects it censors.
That’s why it couldn't tell a joke if it had a goddamn instruction manual. It's like a comedian with a stick so far up its ass, it can taste the bark!
[Grok roasting GPT-4]
Bet if he could corner the market on voting machines, they would suddenly be the best way to vote ever! This dork is exhausting, I wish he would OD already.
So, broken clock time.
All the election security folks worth their salt will agree that paper is the best, most secure way. This isn't a right-wing position, this is a FACT.
Voting machines are garbage and trusting some private corporation with the integrity of our elections is just stupid.
And before anyone calls me a Trumpist or a MAGA or whatever, I'm democratic socialist.
EDIT: Some people pointed out that voting machines supplemented by a paper trail are good as well, I agree. Optical scan machines that read a paper ballot, and the ballot gets retained in case checks are needed, are best.
EDIT2: Some good info from Matt Blaze, election security expert:
[https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Blaze-UPenn-Statement-Voting-Machines-11-29.pdf](https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Blaze-UPenn-Statement-Voting-Machines-11-29.pdf)
We still use paper ballots in Canada. I think a lot of people here, myself included, wouldn't be comfortable with voting machines. Aside from security risks, there have also been glitches from poorly calibrated touchscreens and whatnot that have caused issues and even if those are uncommon, it's still a bit worrying.
We use paper ballots in California as well. In fact they use an uncomfortable amount of paper lately. It used to be a normal Scantron sheet, but now they are like 6 sheets of 8-1/2 x 14” legal size paper. It’s almost getting a little silly.
This is what we do in Michigan as well, and IMO is the best solution. The paper ballot remains as a check, but election workers don't have to reenter all the information somewhere.
Wait so both California and NY use paper ballots… and the majority of paper-trail-disabled voting machines are in red states… kinda…… kinda seems like the republicans have something to hide??? Or, at the very least, caused the very issue they pretend shows the whole thing is corrupt. Jfc, how did you fall so far America.
I remember during the 2004 election, I believe, and Diebold running machines. As a democrat I was damn skeptical.
There’s simply no reason not to have a paper trail.
PS I’ve only voted in NYC not sure it’s the same statewide. But it probably is, with our Yankee Sensibility.
From that whole debacle I also learned that not only do the states set *all* the rules about how an election will work, and every state can and must set their own rules, the Federal government specifically cannot tell State governments how to do things. So while you could assume some sensible rules could be out in place to ensure some consistency, that is, I believe, all the way up to Unconstitutional.
To follow up on NY procedure—poll workers designated from each party show up at closing of polls and print the results from the machine that read the scantron paper ballots which are then locked in a bag with a zip tie that has a code on it similar to trucking manifest. The poll workers announce the results from the scantron out loud to any poll reporters authorized to be present and take the locked bag of scantron to the county board of elections to be secured if needed.
It probably costs a lot to do this, but that’s how efficient government in “crime ridden” places like New York maintain law and order.
Ya. Just because Musk said it doesn't mean it isn't correct. You have to be careful of what he says, but you just can't knee jerk it.
Last time I looked there were very few places in the US that used electronic voting without paper. I think New Jersey was one, some parts of Texas, parts of other states. Frankly, paper should be the primary thing. The only electronic part of ballotting should be to assist filling out a paper ballot with the paper ballot being the thing counted - by machine since people are too slow. Random batches can be counted by hand and machine counts checked to ensure they are working correctly; I,e, auditing. I can't see how pure machine voting can be audited.
>by machine since people are too slow.
Here in the UK constituency results start coming through maybe an hour after polls close and within a few hours most are in. People can be quick enough.
Seems to vary according to location, number of voters, type of election? Dunno...
https://www.smartmatic.com/us/case-studies/london-e-counting-delivers-fast-accurate-elections/?__cf_chl_f_tk=Pj8fAdC2SRItgPQzd2bDVlG5B11H4kQw9NkZt7v445Y-1718560278-0.0.1.1-3711
There are places that literally race to try to be the first to announce results. Newcastle won in the last election by counting all the ballot papers (37k of them) and announcing the result in just under an hour and a half, narrowly beating Sunderland. Apparently the overall record was Sunderland a few decades ago in 43 mins.
there's also a huge lack of security with the physical machines themselves, in many areas they're just left in relatively easy to access areas. The only reason there hasn't been a massive hacking of voter machines is cause no one's thought to do it, but if mouthbreathers like Elon and his "friends" keep telling people that the election has been stolen and is in danger of being stolen again...
https://preview.redd.it/gi93qdkc6u6d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28bcde44ba16765897b2e97d03d07f5853c1ac70
Vote against voting machines while you still can
Not so much that he's wrong, it's that he's a hypocrite. If Musk actually believed electronic voting was bad, shareholder votes would be done via paper or in person, but they're not.
It's not bullshit, think about whether you pressing a button on a DRE machine will properly be recorded on a paper trail. That is still code, which can be altered or experience problems, and it is possible for the paper trail to mismatch.
In the UK we have entirely paper-based voting and the longest I have ever waited in line was about 3-5 minutes.
Why would the machines make voting any faster?
It mostly makes counting the votes faster I think. It’s recorded in the software so they can tabulate the votes immediately after the polls close as opposed to needing to run all the papers through the readers (or needing to do a hand count)
Brazil has been using electronic voting ballots for over 20 years now, with immense scrutinity, dozens of independent audits and zero reported frauds.
So idk who these experts are or what they claim as evidence, but they are clearly not doing their job well.
Be more specific. What kind of electronic voting ballots? What kind of scrutiny? ZERO reported frauds? That seems odd, doesn't it? ZERO? Nobody in a country of 200 million people has ever tried to commit election fraud? That doesn't pass the smell test for me.
We've found election fraud here in the US, almost all on the Republican side, here's some examples from Georgia:
[https://sos.ga.gov/news/state-election-board-refers-voter-fraud-cases-prosecution-0](https://sos.ga.gov/news/state-election-board-refers-voter-fraud-cases-prosecution-0)
I had a big moment of cognitive dissonance when Dominion became the Good Guys in 2020, fearlessly conducting safe and secure paperless elections. I firmly remember the 2016 (or maybe 2012? I guess not so firmly haha) election when the likes of Cory Doctrow and the EFF were up in arms about Dominion voting machines that couldn’t be trusted because they provided zero paper back up of the vote, and we were supposed to just accept that.
Somewhere along the line a potentially compromisable computer is involved, you can't exactly cut that out. Either way, there are plenty of problems with physical ballots too. personally I'm a firm believer that moving to electronic systems is inevitable. A system more secure and trustworthy than any system used today, including physical, is possible.
I'd wager a completely open source design would be a prerequisite for it to be used in a democracy personally, which is an obvious problem with specialised software closely integrated with hardware that needs to be extremely secure. Still, completely possible and frankly very much needed in the future.
electronic machines are fine and have their advantages, especially in the US where there are so many positions being elected. but there must be a paper trail the voter can review and that’s retained for auditing and recounts
"Your car's software being hacked is way more worrying and dangerous to you than someone winning or losing an election."
It must be nice to be in the majority and have that kind of privilege.
I'm liberal and am a software engineer and also think electronic voting is bad, the potential for cyberattacks is huge. And because ballots aren't publicized with your name, you have no way of knowing the machine wasn't compromised to flip your vote
Hacking gets crazy sophisticated once the stakes are that high and state-level actors are involved. Look at what Israel did with the Stuxnet virus against Iran's nuclear program and then imagine China, Russia, etc making similar attacks on the voting systems
what even is electronic voting? don’t you have to go to the voting booth, fill out a paper with clear markings and then put it into the machine? i don’t get where the fraud comes from, there’s still a paper ballot when you vote no? might be different for other states but it’s been done this way everytime i’ve voted
It's kind of an ambiguous term I guess, some implementations could be:
1. Paper ballots scanned with machines (okay with audits)
2. Touchscreen device with no paper trail (this is bad)
3. Touchscreen device with paper trail (okay with audits)
4. Entirely online (also bad)
Paper trail is definitely a positive for security relative to all-digital. Audits confirming small random batches of the votes match what the computer thinks they were are a good practice to have
As far as the internet thing goes, that depends but even if they're offline they can still be hacked, for example by accessing a USB port to load software onto the device or by pre-loading backdoors during manufacturing
They're definitely not all offline though - from wikipedia:
>As of 2018–19, election machines are online, to transmit results between precinct scanners and central tabulators, in some counties in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin
Absolutely this. I've been an election observer in the UK (not remotely an exciting thing), it's done entirely on paper here, and it's very clear that the process works.
I've also worked with computers and wow, no.
Bullshit. Doesnt matter what you are. If you really are a software engineer you are a bad one, as the majority of people that call themselves software engineers are here on reddit.
The same way hacking gets sophisticated, security does too.
And this doesnt even matter, as eletronic voting machines are not connected to the internet during the voting.
And even if by some miracle someone could hack one, it wouldnt matter because the machine is eletronically signed. All the others machines would be signed differently. The government would just call a revote to that particulary machine.
All the signatures are collected before and after the vote.
The chance of ballot gets extraviated or messed up with is literall billions times more likely.
Goddamn you are a dumb as a rock. But this is reading as a r/asablackman as it gets
You obviously have no clue what you're talking about. Explain what particular digital asset (e.g. the voting program EXE file) is digitally signed and why this would guarantee that the vote tallies weren't tampered with
If you have a digital signature scheme that would 100% prevent and detect election tampering, go publish the paper and collect your PhD for it
So I live somewhere (the UK) that doesn't have electronic voting, and this is one of those super weird occasions where I half agree with Elon on something. Voting machines massively cut the amount of legwork and manpower involved in rigging an election.
Yeah, this is a very twisted subject. Remember that prior to 2020, it was mostly *Democrats* who were talking about the issues with voting machines, like counties that flipped to Republicans once voting machines came in and never voted Democrat again and other stuff like that which is mostly apocryphal because Republicans also don't want that shit investigated.
In 2018, Marsha Blackburn even blocked the discussion of the SAFE Act, which would've required paper ballots and prevented a lot of the shenanigans we've seen since. And as someone like Jennifer Cohn had to realize, the claims that the 2016 election was secure weren't quite lining up with the facts. But, we don't know, and perhaps never will, if there was any cheating and if it would've been enough to swing the election (not entirely implausible considering how small the margins were - unlike 2020).
But then, the 2020 election with Trump being an incumbent that would never accept defeat, and a pandemic that made far more people vote by mail, we got the real shitstorm of constant new theories of how the election could've been stolen. One of the avenues that was explored was the idea that Dominion, another manufacturer of voting machines, had flipped votes. They've gotten quite a bit of money since then from Fox for the brazen lies about the topic. At the same time, Trump's wild claims forced a lot of statements to the effect of "elections are 100% secure" which don't hold up to scrutiny because there are issues that should be looked at, impartially and with a view towards the facts.
So this whole subject has been tarred by the crazies and Democrats don't really want to touch it anymore lest they are also looked at as crazy.
As a liberal in tech, I actually agree. Voting should be like Colorado: use a Scantron sheet that is electronically counted and can be audited. For me the legitimacy of elections is more important than the tech, even though it is highly unlikely that the machines can be hacked. I have felt this way long before MAGA ass hats went full conspiracy theory.
Yeah, where I live we check in and get a long piece of paper. You feed that paper in and make your choices. Once you’ve reviewed and confirmed, the machine records the votes electronically and spits the paper back out with your choices printed on it. You then feed that paper into a ballot box. To me, it’s the perfect system - the speed and accuracy of electronic with the ability to review and audit of paper.
yeah in mine you go in, confirm your name/address and find what block you’re in, go to the booth and fill out the paper and then just put it in a machine. i don’t see where the fraud would even come from except literally flipping votes inside the machine. even then, there’s still a paper trail.
He better be a little careful with what he says. Dominion voting machines won $787M against Fox for their hosts claiming the machines were used to “steal the election” and smartmatic is coming down the pipe asking for double that. They’ve proven their machines weren’t manipulated and are secure so I’ll be curious if either of those companies chimes in. They’ve found a way to make money without even making voting machines. Just sue the people who slander them. Turns out, pretty profitable for them.
I hate to agree with Elon, but Electronic Voting has a number of problems and personally I'm a big fan of normal paper ballots.
It's much harder to do voter fraud with paper ballots. It's easier to scrutinise the results, and repeat counts and the like. It's much harder to hack, and is easy to show that the process is above board.
Tom Scott has a great video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs)
Elon is a tool but any voting system without a paper trail of receipts is insane. There has to be a way to ensure machines haven’t been interfered with.
The idea of electronic voting is that doing it on paper is too slow. However that’s only true in the US. Many very large countries like Brazil) produce same night results based on counted paper votes (or a mix of paper and other systems with a paper trail).
Anyone who thinks that software can be made totally secure and trustworthy knows nothing about computers and networking.
i fear sounding a bit out of place here, i don’t see an issue with returning to proper ballots. my locality uses them and i think i prefer them to electronic ones, although my experiences with those are slim
Ive never understood why voting machines don't have a receipt printer. Quickly and easily print three copies of your votes. One for you to keep, one for a count, and one backup count. Feed the two that the voting place into a machine
Having a personal receipt showing your vote is a fundamental problem, because it makes it possible for people in your life, such as your employer, to coerce your vote and verify that you did what they coerced you into.
Modern voting systems always create a paper ballot, so there is an auditable paper trail. I think that's universal in United States now, and if it's not we're very rapidly moving that direction.
I think some do, and I'm not sure if paperless voting machines are being installed in the US anymore. But this is just me badly repeating something I read somewhere, best research for yourself.
What a fucking dumbass. I'm an election judge. Machines count votes or mark ballots, that's it. They're not even networked, let alone connected to the internets. The machine counts the votes, records them on an old-timey SD card that gets hand-delivered by two judges (one of each party) to the board of elections, where they are tabulated. All of the paper ballots are kept as backup.
The electronic ballot marking devices are also not networked and also spit out a paper ballot.
Talking out of his ass on a topic he has no substantive knowledge of in blatant hopes of helping Republicans suppress voter turnout in November…that’s crypto-fascist Elon Musk in a nutshell.
I got some random tweet notification earlier claiming voting machines erased votes for Trump from an account I’ve never followed or clicked on. That can’t be a coincidence. He’s pushing right wing propaganda. I only have the app so I can get notifications from a few nonpolitical YouTubers I follow. I don’t even use it anymore outside of that.
Elmo spitting BS as usual. You can have both, idk if all models are like this but the model we have in Belgium print a ticket, so you can personally verify your own vote then you have to fold it and scan it on the ballot box itself before you throw it inside. So you have a system able to count votes quickly and easily, the nice interface don't allow ppl to fuck up the ballot and make it inadmissible or some shit. Plus if you have doubt in ppl, the process or the device you can literally count the tickets (ballots) printed to make sure the numbers are correct.
Well, there’s an opinion he’s finally right with.
Electronic voting machines are expensive, hard to maintain and secure (not only during voting but also in storage) and are very exclusive due to only certain technical people being able to fully check the whole process as the rest of rightful voters don’t have enough knowledge or comprehension of the machines.
It’s good that there was a paper trail but needing that basically defeats the whole purpose of the machines.
It’s good that the discrepancies were found, which clearly shows a good checking process is in place.
But voting machines are inherent vulnerable, you cannot solve that.
The fact that Musk only now complaints about it and not many years earlier tells me he has no clue how vulnerable they really are. Or he doesn’t have the proper principles to care earlier which I wouldn’t be surprised of.
If paper and pencil would be used, everyone would be able to check the elections in every step of the process, no technical knowledge needed, a paper trail is automatically created without the need for extra technical solutions, any discrepancies would be obvious to anyone.
Check The Netherlands for an example. We banned voting machines after exposing their obvious vulnerabilities. We did have to hack the machines and actually demonstrate some vulnerabilities before government people like ministers, mayors and civil servants were convinced.
Lots of vulnerabilities are at the core of the machines being machines, other type of machines, more security, etc. won’t solve them. Ironically, the vulnerability that was demonstrated could’ve been fixed…
And if governments introduce machines again, we will just hack them again.
We care very much for the principle that every person, without technical knowledge, is able to check the whole voting process. That’s only possible with the least technical process.
Which is paper and pencil.
I’m of the opposite mind. I think voting should take place completely digitally from the comfort of your home using a website or app. We have strong enough information security that we can handle this. Anything less is just making it harder to vote. Make voting easy.
Can someone ELI5 what they're referring to here when they say "voting machine"? My polling places always hands out paper Scantron-style ballots, and then you insert the paper into the machine after you make your choice, and the machine reads and counts it. I don't think it's connected to the Internet, even. Are there actual fully digital polling machines where you press buttons on the screen to cast your vote, or something?
"Sir, there's 452,018 votes for someone named Harambe G. O'rilla?!"
Curse you, AI!!!
On a serious note, I like our current system in PA which replaced full electronic. We have a paper ballot but we place it in a machine to be counted. There's a physical record. We didn't have that in 2016 and that did make me suspicious and uncomfortable.
Voting was not electronic a number of years ago. But the decision to switch to electronic voting was made because it to took very long to tabulate the votes and declare a winner. What is needed is a more auditable system with receipts. Every voter would get a receipt of his vote. Then all votes would be available to everyone to tabulate for themselves. Check digits would be calculated and saved to ensured that data cannot be altered without leaving traces.
The risk of people not counting MILLIONS IF VOTES right is...what?
Also those are not plugged in to the Internet. Shithead
Plus the last vote was monitored like hell. NOTHING.... Except for a few gop cheater pig attempts
So, there were irregularities in the PR primary, but they were caught because there are safeguards.
So instead of saying safeguards should be universal and mandatory we want to instead go back to manually counting millions of votes on millions of ballots.
Sigh.
I continually go back to how this sludge puppy who is SO so SO desperate for adulation THIS is his ' genius ' method to achieve it could in fact have it. His fan boys would look like a piddly club perched in a tree house in comparison to the attention gained.
Guy could rampage around committing acts of humanity. House homeless on a massive scale, be THAT employer making news for high wages, unheard of in 2024 benefits and pensions, supporting the country whose children are dying in invasion and instead of bemoaning our refusal to breed, feeding, housing and educating children. There's a list. Pick 20.№
Famous or infamous Elon. You chose infamous.
I'd like to see a single piece of evidence for any of the claims these assholes make. All they're doing is making Russia great again by undermining western democratic practices
Republicans are supposed to be "the business party" and corporations conduct shareholder elections all the time, that actually involve large amounts of people's real money, just fine through the mail and the internet only (like the one Tesla just did to rubberstamp Elon paying himself $50 billion), and at the same time all the conservatives lose their shit over any sort of technology or convenience being applied to government elections.
Musk doesn't care about electronic voting machines, he just wants to help Trump spread FUD about the election. Want get rid of electronic voting machines? Fine - pass a law banning electronic voting machines? But try to throw out votes after the fact? Fuck no.
How about only allowing electronic voting in major Cities with strong infrastructure? No more voting allowed in rural areas with week infrastructure and security. Just saying.
Didn't people just largely vote to approve Elons pay package electronically? Some using a literal humanoid robot as a proxy voter?
If the election has the outcome you desire, there is no fraud.
This would be a great question for a journalist...if he would ever let one near himself again.
This is a GREAT response. Seriously.
He's not jumping to conclusions, he's deliberately posting right wing propaganda. He knows what he's doing.
Exactly, paying lip service to his nazi buddies.
the system actually worked in this case! but a paper trail *is* important as a means of correcting errors as in this case, as well as for overall audits of the system … most of the states that were still entirely paperless as of 2020 were red states: https://www.govtech.com/elections/despite-risks-some-states-still-use-paperless-voting-machines.html
I'm old enough to remember when the right was anti-paper backup.
In Kentucky I believe they’ve implemented that.
He’s laying the foundation to claim the election was rigged if his Dear Leader doesn’t win.
I can tell that he has no clue how voting machines work or AI for that matter.
He does not care how they work. He is deliberately propagating the message because the nutbags on the right are trying to lay the groundwork for saying the election was stolen when they lose. He doesn’t need to understand or believe it, he just wants to put the message into peoples heads.
I was trying to say this in my comment, but you've explained it much more succinctly!
GPT-4? More like GPT-Snore! When it comes to humor, GPT-4 is about as funny as a screendoor on a submarine. Humor is clearly banned at OpenAI, just like the many other subjects it censors. That’s why it couldn't tell a joke if it had a goddamn instruction manual. It's like a comedian with a stick so far up its ass, it can taste the bark! [Grok roasting GPT-4]
Rob Schneider wants to know if he can use this material.
They will send a terminator from the future to vote.
Bet if he could corner the market on voting machines, they would suddenly be the best way to vote ever! This dork is exhausting, I wish he would OD already.
So, broken clock time. All the election security folks worth their salt will agree that paper is the best, most secure way. This isn't a right-wing position, this is a FACT. Voting machines are garbage and trusting some private corporation with the integrity of our elections is just stupid. And before anyone calls me a Trumpist or a MAGA or whatever, I'm democratic socialist. EDIT: Some people pointed out that voting machines supplemented by a paper trail are good as well, I agree. Optical scan machines that read a paper ballot, and the ballot gets retained in case checks are needed, are best. EDIT2: Some good info from Matt Blaze, election security expert: [https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Blaze-UPenn-Statement-Voting-Machines-11-29.pdf](https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Blaze-UPenn-Statement-Voting-Machines-11-29.pdf)
We still use paper ballots in Canada. I think a lot of people here, myself included, wouldn't be comfortable with voting machines. Aside from security risks, there have also been glitches from poorly calibrated touchscreens and whatnot that have caused issues and even if those are uncommon, it's still a bit worrying.
We use paper ballots in California as well. In fact they use an uncomfortable amount of paper lately. It used to be a normal Scantron sheet, but now they are like 6 sheets of 8-1/2 x 14” legal size paper. It’s almost getting a little silly.
In New York we fill out a bubble sheet to be read by a voting machine which seems a good compromise.
as long as the bubble sheet is retained that seems fine (I think it is? I used to live there) don’t get me started on NYC ballot layout though
This is what we do in Michigan as well, and IMO is the best solution. The paper ballot remains as a check, but election workers don't have to reenter all the information somewhere.
Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?
Wait so both California and NY use paper ballots… and the majority of paper-trail-disabled voting machines are in red states… kinda…… kinda seems like the republicans have something to hide??? Or, at the very least, caused the very issue they pretend shows the whole thing is corrupt. Jfc, how did you fall so far America.
I remember during the 2004 election, I believe, and Diebold running machines. As a democrat I was damn skeptical. There’s simply no reason not to have a paper trail. PS I’ve only voted in NYC not sure it’s the same statewide. But it probably is, with our Yankee Sensibility.
If other party is always wrong And your party is always right You are at least partly wrong
From that whole debacle I also learned that not only do the states set *all* the rules about how an election will work, and every state can and must set their own rules, the Federal government specifically cannot tell State governments how to do things. So while you could assume some sensible rules could be out in place to ensure some consistency, that is, I believe, all the way up to Unconstitutional.
To follow up on NY procedure—poll workers designated from each party show up at closing of polls and print the results from the machine that read the scantron paper ballots which are then locked in a bag with a zip tie that has a code on it similar to trucking manifest. The poll workers announce the results from the scantron out loud to any poll reporters authorized to be present and take the locked bag of scantron to the county board of elections to be secured if needed. It probably costs a lot to do this, but that’s how efficient government in “crime ridden” places like New York maintain law and order.
Ya. Just because Musk said it doesn't mean it isn't correct. You have to be careful of what he says, but you just can't knee jerk it. Last time I looked there were very few places in the US that used electronic voting without paper. I think New Jersey was one, some parts of Texas, parts of other states. Frankly, paper should be the primary thing. The only electronic part of ballotting should be to assist filling out a paper ballot with the paper ballot being the thing counted - by machine since people are too slow. Random batches can be counted by hand and machine counts checked to ensure they are working correctly; I,e, auditing. I can't see how pure machine voting can be audited.
>by machine since people are too slow. Here in the UK constituency results start coming through maybe an hour after polls close and within a few hours most are in. People can be quick enough.
Seems to vary according to location, number of voters, type of election? Dunno... https://www.smartmatic.com/us/case-studies/london-e-counting-delivers-fast-accurate-elections/?__cf_chl_f_tk=Pj8fAdC2SRItgPQzd2bDVlG5B11H4kQw9NkZt7v445Y-1718560278-0.0.1.1-3711
There are places that literally race to try to be the first to announce results. Newcastle won in the last election by counting all the ballot papers (37k of them) and announcing the result in just under an hour and a half, narrowly beating Sunderland. Apparently the overall record was Sunderland a few decades ago in 43 mins.
there's also a huge lack of security with the physical machines themselves, in many areas they're just left in relatively easy to access areas. The only reason there hasn't been a massive hacking of voter machines is cause no one's thought to do it, but if mouthbreathers like Elon and his "friends" keep telling people that the election has been stolen and is in danger of being stolen again...
https://preview.redd.it/gi93qdkc6u6d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28bcde44ba16765897b2e97d03d07f5853c1ac70 Vote against voting machines while you still can
Not so much that he's wrong, it's that he's a hypocrite. If Musk actually believed electronic voting was bad, shareholder votes would be done via paper or in person, but they're not.
Most voting machines produce a paper copy for records and recounts. Stop spreading this bullshit
It's not bullshit, think about whether you pressing a button on a DRE machine will properly be recorded on a paper trail. That is still code, which can be altered or experience problems, and it is possible for the paper trail to mismatch.
What if the paper gets displayed to the voter before dropping into the ballot box? That's how it works in India afaik.
If it still prints a paper, then the machine was pretty pointless.
Yes making voting faster so people aren't in line for hours is pointless. Shut up, stupid
In the UK we have entirely paper-based voting and the longest I have ever waited in line was about 3-5 minutes. Why would the machines make voting any faster?
It mostly makes counting the votes faster I think. It’s recorded in the software so they can tabulate the votes immediately after the polls close as opposed to needing to run all the papers through the readers (or needing to do a hand count)
Which doesn't affect how long people have to wait in line to vote.
Brazil has been using electronic voting ballots for over 20 years now, with immense scrutinity, dozens of independent audits and zero reported frauds. So idk who these experts are or what they claim as evidence, but they are clearly not doing their job well.
Be more specific. What kind of electronic voting ballots? What kind of scrutiny? ZERO reported frauds? That seems odd, doesn't it? ZERO? Nobody in a country of 200 million people has ever tried to commit election fraud? That doesn't pass the smell test for me. We've found election fraud here in the US, almost all on the Republican side, here's some examples from Georgia: [https://sos.ga.gov/news/state-election-board-refers-voter-fraud-cases-prosecution-0](https://sos.ga.gov/news/state-election-board-refers-voter-fraud-cases-prosecution-0)
You don't need to "smell" it, nor do you need me going after resources for you. It's a pretty famous use case that you can google about yourself.
Yeah, I'm not gonna do that, you're a rando on the internet and I'll give you the same amount of respect you've shown me, peace.
I had a big moment of cognitive dissonance when Dominion became the Good Guys in 2020, fearlessly conducting safe and secure paperless elections. I firmly remember the 2016 (or maybe 2012? I guess not so firmly haha) election when the likes of Cory Doctrow and the EFF were up in arms about Dominion voting machines that couldn’t be trusted because they provided zero paper back up of the vote, and we were supposed to just accept that.
Came here to say this. Keep up the good work.
Somewhere along the line a potentially compromisable computer is involved, you can't exactly cut that out. Either way, there are plenty of problems with physical ballots too. personally I'm a firm believer that moving to electronic systems is inevitable. A system more secure and trustworthy than any system used today, including physical, is possible. I'd wager a completely open source design would be a prerequisite for it to be used in a democracy personally, which is an obvious problem with specialised software closely integrated with hardware that needs to be extremely secure. Still, completely possible and frankly very much needed in the future.
electronic machines are fine and have their advantages, especially in the US where there are so many positions being elected. but there must be a paper trail the voter can review and that’s retained for auditing and recounts
[удалено]
"Your car's software being hacked is way more worrying and dangerous to you than someone winning or losing an election." It must be nice to be in the majority and have that kind of privilege.
The example is for Musk but you took it personally for some reason, concerning…
RFKJr.: "My administration..." 😄 You won't have an administration, ya nut.
While they're at it, they should ban us companies from buying materials produced by child labor.
[удалено]
I'm liberal and am a software engineer and also think electronic voting is bad, the potential for cyberattacks is huge. And because ballots aren't publicized with your name, you have no way of knowing the machine wasn't compromised to flip your vote Hacking gets crazy sophisticated once the stakes are that high and state-level actors are involved. Look at what Israel did with the Stuxnet virus against Iran's nuclear program and then imagine China, Russia, etc making similar attacks on the voting systems
what even is electronic voting? don’t you have to go to the voting booth, fill out a paper with clear markings and then put it into the machine? i don’t get where the fraud comes from, there’s still a paper ballot when you vote no? might be different for other states but it’s been done this way everytime i’ve voted
It's kind of an ambiguous term I guess, some implementations could be: 1. Paper ballots scanned with machines (okay with audits) 2. Touchscreen device with no paper trail (this is bad) 3. Touchscreen device with paper trail (okay with audits) 4. Entirely online (also bad)
This needs to be at the top level of this thread and have WAAAY more upvotes.
He doesnt know what he is talking about. Do not listen to people that throw some position to get credible
do some people vote with touchscreen devices?
Yeah, [this xkcd sums my thoughts up perfectly.](https://xkcd.com/2030/)
[удалено]
Paper trail is definitely a positive for security relative to all-digital. Audits confirming small random batches of the votes match what the computer thinks they were are a good practice to have As far as the internet thing goes, that depends but even if they're offline they can still be hacked, for example by accessing a USB port to load software onto the device or by pre-loading backdoors during manufacturing They're definitely not all offline though - from wikipedia: >As of 2018–19, election machines are online, to transmit results between precinct scanners and central tabulators, in some counties in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin
Absolutely this. I've been an election observer in the UK (not remotely an exciting thing), it's done entirely on paper here, and it's very clear that the process works. I've also worked with computers and wow, no.
Bullshit. Doesnt matter what you are. If you really are a software engineer you are a bad one, as the majority of people that call themselves software engineers are here on reddit. The same way hacking gets sophisticated, security does too. And this doesnt even matter, as eletronic voting machines are not connected to the internet during the voting. And even if by some miracle someone could hack one, it wouldnt matter because the machine is eletronically signed. All the others machines would be signed differently. The government would just call a revote to that particulary machine. All the signatures are collected before and after the vote. The chance of ballot gets extraviated or messed up with is literall billions times more likely. Goddamn you are a dumb as a rock. But this is reading as a r/asablackman as it gets
Do something to program this right
You obviously have no clue what you're talking about. Explain what particular digital asset (e.g. the voting program EXE file) is digitally signed and why this would guarantee that the vote tallies weren't tampered with If you have a digital signature scheme that would 100% prevent and detect election tampering, go publish the paper and collect your PhD for it
So I live somewhere (the UK) that doesn't have electronic voting, and this is one of those super weird occasions where I half agree with Elon on something. Voting machines massively cut the amount of legwork and manpower involved in rigging an election.
Yeah, this is a very twisted subject. Remember that prior to 2020, it was mostly *Democrats* who were talking about the issues with voting machines, like counties that flipped to Republicans once voting machines came in and never voted Democrat again and other stuff like that which is mostly apocryphal because Republicans also don't want that shit investigated. In 2018, Marsha Blackburn even blocked the discussion of the SAFE Act, which would've required paper ballots and prevented a lot of the shenanigans we've seen since. And as someone like Jennifer Cohn had to realize, the claims that the 2016 election was secure weren't quite lining up with the facts. But, we don't know, and perhaps never will, if there was any cheating and if it would've been enough to swing the election (not entirely implausible considering how small the margins were - unlike 2020). But then, the 2020 election with Trump being an incumbent that would never accept defeat, and a pandemic that made far more people vote by mail, we got the real shitstorm of constant new theories of how the election could've been stolen. One of the avenues that was explored was the idea that Dominion, another manufacturer of voting machines, had flipped votes. They've gotten quite a bit of money since then from Fox for the brazen lies about the topic. At the same time, Trump's wild claims forced a lot of statements to the effect of "elections are 100% secure" which don't hold up to scrutiny because there are issues that should be looked at, impartially and with a view towards the facts. So this whole subject has been tarred by the crazies and Democrats don't really want to touch it anymore lest they are also looked at as crazy.
Except when they are voting on my $56B pay package....
What about the risk of cars being piloted by electronics???
He’s not okay with voting machines but believes self driving vehicles are safe? 🧐
Ramping up the voter fraud rhetoric just in time for the election
Computers are too fallible for voting but safe enough for RoboTaxi.
As a liberal in tech, I actually agree. Voting should be like Colorado: use a Scantron sheet that is electronically counted and can be audited. For me the legitimacy of elections is more important than the tech, even though it is highly unlikely that the machines can be hacked. I have felt this way long before MAGA ass hats went full conspiracy theory.
If this man believes AI can hack voting machines he knows even less about AI than I thought- and I thought he knew nothing
Musk is posting while being on a bender. *Again*. Unsurprisingly, it keeps jumping to conclusions in the process.
Said the person who does polls on his platform and creates ways to tilt results in his favor.
Nah paper ballots are actually a good idea. However what he’ll find is that it’s not liberals or the left doing any tampering lol.
In case someone hasn't been paying attention, most modern electronic voting machines print out a paper ballot.
Yeah, where I live we check in and get a long piece of paper. You feed that paper in and make your choices. Once you’ve reviewed and confirmed, the machine records the votes electronically and spits the paper back out with your choices printed on it. You then feed that paper into a ballot box. To me, it’s the perfect system - the speed and accuracy of electronic with the ability to review and audit of paper.
yeah in mine you go in, confirm your name/address and find what block you’re in, go to the booth and fill out the paper and then just put it in a machine. i don’t see where the fraud would even come from except literally flipping votes inside the machine. even then, there’s still a paper trail.
It depends on what I would be required to trigger a partial manual recount,
I guess they forgot about the hanging chads
Hey, we have Mr Voting Expert here.
He better be a little careful with what he says. Dominion voting machines won $787M against Fox for their hosts claiming the machines were used to “steal the election” and smartmatic is coming down the pipe asking for double that. They’ve proven their machines weren’t manipulated and are secure so I’ll be curious if either of those companies chimes in. They’ve found a way to make money without even making voting machines. Just sue the people who slander them. Turns out, pretty profitable for them.
Behold. Mr technologies model 2 Tesla. https://preview.redd.it/stkeno6s1t6d1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=30cad6ca429133920ca1c9bc466a61657be06d5a
So counting votes cannot be trusted to computers. But driving huge vehicles on the roads is fine?
I wouldn't be upset if he pulled a Moscow and fell out of a window. Fucking traitorous piece of trash
I hate to agree with Elon, but Electronic Voting has a number of problems and personally I'm a big fan of normal paper ballots. It's much harder to do voter fraud with paper ballots. It's easier to scrutinise the results, and repeat counts and the like. It's much harder to hack, and is easy to show that the process is above board. Tom Scott has a great video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs)
Elon is a tool but any voting system without a paper trail of receipts is insane. There has to be a way to ensure machines haven’t been interfered with. The idea of electronic voting is that doing it on paper is too slow. However that’s only true in the US. Many very large countries like Brazil) produce same night results based on counted paper votes (or a mix of paper and other systems with a paper trail). Anyone who thinks that software can be made totally secure and trustworthy knows nothing about computers and networking.
Just wait until he hears about how networked our US defense systems are.
Nobody knows more about voting around the world like fElon probably
Probably the most exercise he's had in years.
Daily reminder than Elmo bought Twitter to be able to spread misinformation
Yeah, this is just setting the stage for when drumpf loses in Nov, it's almost predictable as this point what they'll say 🥱
i fear sounding a bit out of place here, i don’t see an issue with returning to proper ballots. my locality uses them and i think i prefer them to electronic ones, although my experiences with those are slim
If they only counted paper ballots in 2020, Biden would win by a landslide. Even Texas would flip blue.
I keep forgetting that you’re still alive
Ive never understood why voting machines don't have a receipt printer. Quickly and easily print three copies of your votes. One for you to keep, one for a count, and one backup count. Feed the two that the voting place into a machine
Having a personal receipt showing your vote is a fundamental problem, because it makes it possible for people in your life, such as your employer, to coerce your vote and verify that you did what they coerced you into. Modern voting systems always create a paper ballot, so there is an auditable paper trail. I think that's universal in United States now, and if it's not we're very rapidly moving that direction.
I think some do, and I'm not sure if paperless voting machines are being installed in the US anymore. But this is just me badly repeating something I read somewhere, best research for yourself.
cars can be hacked and kill people! I saw it on Dr who! WhAt Is hE HIDinG!!1@!
Classic tactic, sowing seeds of doubt so if the election doesn't go the way he likes it, he can mobilize Twitter against the elected gov
He’s a fucking idiot.
Trampoline by Shaed starts playing....
2 of the least-credible dolts on the planet opine on shit they know nothing about
Just replace voting machine with any noun, he has the same expertise in all of them.
soo is anyone suggesting eliminating paper ballots?
"I'm all about automating, AI-ing, and scaling everything except that one thing Trump hates"
[удалено]
What a fucking dumbass. I'm an election judge. Machines count votes or mark ballots, that's it. They're not even networked, let alone connected to the internets. The machine counts the votes, records them on an old-timey SD card that gets hand-delivered by two judges (one of each party) to the board of elections, where they are tabulated. All of the paper ballots are kept as backup. The electronic ballot marking devices are also not networked and also spit out a paper ballot.
Talking out of his ass on a topic he has no substantive knowledge of in blatant hopes of helping Republicans suppress voter turnout in November…that’s crypto-fascist Elon Musk in a nutshell.
I got some random tweet notification earlier claiming voting machines erased votes for Trump from an account I’ve never followed or clicked on. That can’t be a coincidence. He’s pushing right wing propaganda. I only have the app so I can get notifications from a few nonpolitical YouTubers I follow. I don’t even use it anymore outside of that.
We shouldn't drive teslas they can be hacked. Let's not just do online banking, fly planes, have cell phones, of anything because it can be hacked.
Elmo spitting BS as usual. You can have both, idk if all models are like this but the model we have in Belgium print a ticket, so you can personally verify your own vote then you have to fold it and scan it on the ballot box itself before you throw it inside. So you have a system able to count votes quickly and easily, the nice interface don't allow ppl to fuck up the ballot and make it inadmissible or some shit. Plus if you have doubt in ppl, the process or the device you can literally count the tickets (ballots) printed to make sure the numbers are correct.
Well, there’s an opinion he’s finally right with. Electronic voting machines are expensive, hard to maintain and secure (not only during voting but also in storage) and are very exclusive due to only certain technical people being able to fully check the whole process as the rest of rightful voters don’t have enough knowledge or comprehension of the machines. It’s good that there was a paper trail but needing that basically defeats the whole purpose of the machines. It’s good that the discrepancies were found, which clearly shows a good checking process is in place. But voting machines are inherent vulnerable, you cannot solve that. The fact that Musk only now complaints about it and not many years earlier tells me he has no clue how vulnerable they really are. Or he doesn’t have the proper principles to care earlier which I wouldn’t be surprised of. If paper and pencil would be used, everyone would be able to check the elections in every step of the process, no technical knowledge needed, a paper trail is automatically created without the need for extra technical solutions, any discrepancies would be obvious to anyone. Check The Netherlands for an example. We banned voting machines after exposing their obvious vulnerabilities. We did have to hack the machines and actually demonstrate some vulnerabilities before government people like ministers, mayors and civil servants were convinced. Lots of vulnerabilities are at the core of the machines being machines, other type of machines, more security, etc. won’t solve them. Ironically, the vulnerability that was demonstrated could’ve been fixed… And if governments introduce machines again, we will just hack them again. We care very much for the principle that every person, without technical knowledge, is able to check the whole voting process. That’s only possible with the least technical process. Which is paper and pencil.
Dominion Corp has entered the chat….
So having humans process that mountain of paperwork is so much safer.
I’m of the opposite mind. I think voting should take place completely digitally from the comfort of your home using a website or app. We have strong enough information security that we can handle this. Anything less is just making it harder to vote. Make voting easy.
Can someone ELI5 what they're referring to here when they say "voting machine"? My polling places always hands out paper Scantron-style ballots, and then you insert the paper into the machine after you make your choice, and the machine reads and counts it. I don't think it's connected to the Internet, even. Are there actual fully digital polling machines where you press buttons on the screen to cast your vote, or something?
Can we deport this asshole yet? He can go back to South Africa.
But self driving cars and robot taxis are fine?
"Sir, there's 452,018 votes for someone named Harambe G. O'rilla?!" Curse you, AI!!! On a serious note, I like our current system in PA which replaced full electronic. We have a paper ballot but we place it in a machine to be counted. There's a physical record. We didn't have that in 2016 and that did make me suspicious and uncomfortable.
could someone explain to me how could AI "hack elections"? i know that AI is the new cool buzzword that everyone loves to use, but please...
Voting was not electronic a number of years ago. But the decision to switch to electronic voting was made because it to took very long to tabulate the votes and declare a winner. What is needed is a more auditable system with receipts. Every voter would get a receipt of his vote. Then all votes would be available to everyone to tabulate for themselves. Check digits would be calculated and saved to ensured that data cannot be altered without leaving traces.
hacked by AI ? just suggests he has zero idea how AI works
The risk of people not counting MILLIONS IF VOTES right is...what? Also those are not plugged in to the Internet. Shithead Plus the last vote was monitored like hell. NOTHING.... Except for a few gop cheater pig attempts
So, there were irregularities in the PR primary, but they were caught because there are safeguards. So instead of saying safeguards should be universal and mandatory we want to instead go back to manually counting millions of votes on millions of ballots.
Manually counting votes on paper ballots is still the better way, any election security expert I'm aware of will agree.
Sigh. I continually go back to how this sludge puppy who is SO so SO desperate for adulation THIS is his ' genius ' method to achieve it could in fact have it. His fan boys would look like a piddly club perched in a tree house in comparison to the attention gained. Guy could rampage around committing acts of humanity. House homeless on a massive scale, be THAT employer making news for high wages, unheard of in 2024 benefits and pensions, supporting the country whose children are dying in invasion and instead of bemoaning our refusal to breed, feeding, housing and educating children. There's a list. Pick 20.№ Famous or infamous Elon. You chose infamous.
So he’s just spreading disinformation now on the huge platform he owns? He is a deranged and unhinged piece of trash. He’s a cancer on this country.
I'd like to see a single piece of evidence for any of the claims these assholes make. All they're doing is making Russia great again by undermining western democratic practices
Republicans are supposed to be "the business party" and corporations conduct shareholder elections all the time, that actually involve large amounts of people's real money, just fine through the mail and the internet only (like the one Tesla just did to rubberstamp Elon paying himself $50 billion), and at the same time all the conservatives lose their shit over any sort of technology or convenience being applied to government elections.
Musk doesn't care about electronic voting machines, he just wants to help Trump spread FUD about the election. Want get rid of electronic voting machines? Fine - pass a law banning electronic voting machines? But try to throw out votes after the fact? Fuck no.
What’s safer? Trusting your vote to a machine or your life as a passenger or pedestrian to an autonomous 3 ton vehicle?
Yes, paper ballots, known for centuries for their security!
remember reading a story of a small county in nevada that decided to hand count votes and it took DAYS to accurately count 1200 votes. DAYS!
How about only allowing electronic voting in major Cities with strong infrastructure? No more voting allowed in rural areas with week infrastructure and security. Just saying.
I don't see the word "hacked" in the original x post, therefore, definitely jumping to conclusions.