Fortunately, we have the Ministry of Truth on the case!

It also mentioned Pennsylvania which makes you wonder about Trump and his fraud in Pennsylvania remarks.

We marched in protest against his voter suppression in Ohio in '04. John Lewis led the march.

I certainly hope our pentagon cyber experts can get a grip on it all.

Makes me want to return to the old fashioned lever machines.

When Beavis gets more electoral votes this November we're going to with we had hard copies.

But pretty hard to hack. Keep an eye on who lines up for hard copy verifiable voting results and who is in favor of ethereal, black box tabulation of votes.

Dead people on the rolls voted not infrequently. That's one reason for purging voting rolls of inactive voters from time to time--otherwise over time there are more registered voters than there are people living in the precinct, and that's a bad thing.

Chicago was famous for electoral corruption. One popular slogan was "Vote early, vote often, and vote in pencil so we can fix your mistakes." It was funny, but accurate.

If you think of the alternatives critically, you realize that in a lot of places with really bad electoral corruption they're using paper ballots, but the level of electoral fraud is much higher than here. Bags of paper ballots go missing, urns are partly filled before the polls open, bags of ballots are visible before the polls open, etc., etc. "Not like it is here and now" does not mean "better." Not all change is good.

Moreover, if you have a secret ballot you cannot connect the ballot back to you. Write your name on it, somebody will know who voted. That's historically been a bad thing--like violating other Constitutional provisions. The arc of history had tended to be towards greater, not fewer, civil liberties, and that's most often been driven by progressives. It's easy to define a narrow problem and solve it but fail to realize that outside that narrow perspective more problems are created than solved.

Some progressives apparently want negative progress.

In the event of a stolen election with paper ballots, there would be absolutely no way to establish a clean result by resorting to ballot receipts. Most people either wouldn't keep their receipts or else they wouldn't bother to participate in a recount.

Unfortunately, a paper ballot is no guarantee of a clean election. In fact, the concept of secret ballots is itself incompatible with fully verifiable results because someone can always say "hey, that's not how I voted."

Sure, they are then scanned (just like the SAT answer sheets), but we can hold on to the original paper, sealed and stored until the election is certified and any legal challenges satisfied.

Consider the logistics of contacting those 1.5 million secret ballot holders, confirming that they retain their original, unaltered ballots, and that they're willing to go through the trouble of essentially re-voting.

How could that possibly work in reality?

If there's a problem, they recount what they've held on to since the election. Voters would not need to be contacted.

and I'm sure that in all cases the state keeps the paper ballots. At least I've never heard of a state or locality that had people take their ballots home after scanning.

We need look no further than the hanging chads for all the proof we need.

We also have the precedent of "lost" ballots (as in Florida) as well as the question of dubious oversight (as in Florida).

What do we do if there's a discrepancy between the votes cast and the hardcopy ballots? Do we throw out the votes in favor of the ballots? If so, then why not do that in the first place?


Short of a non-secret vote-by-voter-name system, I don't believe that a secret balloting system can offer anything like a true promise of integrity.

Fine, paper ballots.

It's not the election machines at risk, it's the database of voters. So you go and find that you've been deleted. You don't get the paper ballot. Or you find that 500 people have been added, or people doubled.

It's not the machines you vote on, it's the database and where the data's stored.

I've been focusing on the danger of fraudulently (mis)handled ballots, but you're exactly right about the bigger and immediate threat of fraudulent voter disenfranchisement.

Kick a couple hundred thousand more off the voting rolls. That'll teach them hackers.

It would be an act of war. I can't imagine the fury if they were doing this to help the Democratic candidate...

I am sure you can figure out why. Now MAYBE they will do something about it. I will not be holding my breath!

Many of his comments appear to invite hackers of computer-driven polling places, because he realizes that is the only way he will win the election. Why do readers think Trump is so cozy with North Korea, a nation accused of hacking Sony?

even if the attempt failed, when word gets out about hacking into the elections it would still call chaos, with trumpites saying it was all rigged for Hillary when trump loses. could be VERY ugly. putin is using trump to split American in two.

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141561140

The discussion of who wants to "adjust" our election system has meaning and should continue.

Seriously, while hackers have in fact penetrated these state election systems, as well as the State Dept., OMB, NSA, and other government agencies, there's no evidence Hillary's server was ever hacked, on speculation that it could have been.