Half of America's Voting Machines Are Now Owned by a Maga Oligarch

The most egregious example has to be the F-35.

Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".

If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.

I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.

American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.

The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:

- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).

- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.

- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.

- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.

This system feels perfect.

A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.

A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.

You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.

Ballot design has a big impact on self marked ballots. Most of the time it’s fine, but some times it fails badly and a significant number of voters fill it out wrong without knowing.

Second, for a small but significant fraction accessibility is an issue (visually impaired, language issues).

This approach is fairly standard and affordable

Which means many companies can make the equipment/systems...

1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election. 2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.

Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.

This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.

I think you have that the wrong way around.

The benefit of hand counting is that it scales very poorly.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Making ballot counting more efficient is not important. Ensuring that elections can't be tampered with _is_ important.

Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.

Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.

The new gerrymandered prop 50 districts will replace, at great cost to the taxpayer the bipartisan commission drawn districts which were created not long ago based on another statewide proposition as I recall, which of course was also very costly but at least done with the intention of making districts more fair, ie less gerrymandered. But even that redistricting effort was not fair, leaving republicans with about 15% representation despite being much larger proportion of voters. The new prop 50 super gerrymandered districts would reduce that 15% even further, more or less eliminating the other party.

What is so bad about that, other than the wasted tax payer money (the state is currently in the red), is that this decreases California’s political power in DC. It’s in the interest of the state as a whole, even just democrats, to have representation in both parties at the national level. So not only is it wasteful, and intentionally unfair, it’s bad for everyone in the state. And, it’s being done largely to support Gavin Newsom’s eternal presidential ambitions. I think the bulk of the 300 million spent on ads is from his presidential campaign purse.