The fact that a single company has this much potential influence on US elections is the real issue here. The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
You're talking about the mostly peaceful protesters who tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights, right? Sedition and insurrection.
> tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights
If you're pissing your pants in fear of people who fail to do something 200 nights in a row, I'd argue that says a lot more about you than it does them.
Can I say Singletons are not recommended but also agree that there are contexts where it's an "okay enough" option? Singetons are never the "best option" in modern software, but it's not the "worst" in every case either.
Now, filling your code base with incorrect calculations: pretty much always a bad idea.
Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.
That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.
Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.
Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.
> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.
I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.
That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.
Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’
I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”
It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.
Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.
Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.
Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.
Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?
I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)
The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.
Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.
an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.
>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
In Gore's case, we had a razor thin electoral result that hinged on a single state with less than a 550 vote margin against 5.96 million votes cast, or 0.009%. We can argue about how many recounts there should have been, but it makes perfect sense there'd be some contention when the entire election came down to so few votes.
To his credit, he conceded the day after the Supreme Court made their ruling, exhausting his final legal recourse.
You may notice a distinct absence of attacks on the US capitol during the certification of either the 2000 or 2016 elections. You'll also do well to note that Bill Clinton in 2000 and Obama in 2016 dutifully aided their Republican successors getting up to speed with their office on the way in, sharply contrasting Trump's treatment of Biden's incoming administration.
And, to this day, Trump still hasn't publicly conceded his 2020 loss. Quite the opposite - on multiple occasions, he's voiced the opinion that he should be allowed to run again in 2028 to make up for his "stolen" second term.
There are still plenty of Republican members of Congress as well as many state-level Republicans who maintain the 2020 election was stolen.
You would have a hard time finding a single elected Democrat at either the federal or state level who would claim any presidential elections were stolen from their party's candidates.
There is no good faith argument to be made that both parties are the same in this regard.
You are completely wrong, as shown by the other posts. Time to reflect on why and readjust your biases and the gaps that let you fall for clear lies (in the case of Clinton) or muddled thinking (in the case of Gore).
Dems aren't even reopening the Russian interference case once Mueller gave his mediocre report, whereas Trump still says and forces everyone around him to say that 2020 was rigged.
Helplessness? Not at all. I'd be very much in favor of changing the way our elections are run, in many ways.
Pointing out that one person that you don't like is in a position of power isn't the same thing.
I think this quote by Thomas Paine illustrates my position:
> [...] so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
There's a reason the US Constitution prohibits bills of attainder. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, applied equally to all. The way to fix this is via legislation that codifies the system we want to have.
Didn’t America not have laws equal at all for a long time based on the Constitution and only recently it is superficially equal to all (we all know the law doesn’t work the same for everyone)?
- vote marking machines (eg it marks a voter readable ballot that is the official record). You get fast preliminary results and improved voter accessibility but still have very high tamper resistance.
My jurisdiction in Canada uses an OCR machine on a paper ballot. The paper ballot is the official record and recounts are done by hand. Seems to be the obvious way to do things.
It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR.
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.
I'm not comfortable without having a physical "receipt" that shows my vote that I can take with me.
I understand why we don't do that - it would enable people to pay for votes with confidence, or to influence the votes of others via intimidation - but it would certainly make me feel better.
You don't take it with you. It's your ballot, and you submit it into a lock box when you're done. One A4-sized piece of paper with your legibly printed choices and a QR code is your ballot.
When they count your vote later, they have a high-speed system that can scan all the QR codes almost instantly. It's why we know the results in as little as an hour.
If there are any questions, or if the race is tight, a team of auditors can look at the ballot pages to check for any discrepancies. They'll check to make sure the machines themselves weren't tampered with by checking that the printed names and other ballot initiatives match the QR codes.
All elections should be audited regardless of how close the race is or whether there are any questions. Relying on software to count is an obvious vector for manipulation. Given that. Voting machines provide little benefit and more risk.
i think 2020 election proved there are strong legitimacy reasons to prefer a quick count that is almost certainly correct with subsequent paper verification
people attribute some of the election denialism to the fact that initial results showed Trump winning followed by a very late night reversal due to delay in counting mailins
It's also sometimes the case that rural and suburban precincts report before cities, which obviously slants results toward Republicans in early returns.
But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
fair enough, i can just see the potential for more uncertainty and even violence being injected to the process if it takes multiple days to declare a winner and so worry.
Haha yeah dude, totally. Like, what about the false pretenses for the war in Iraq? It's so cool that conspiracy theories are always wrong! (especially if they disagree with whimsicalism's personal preferences!)
I guess you "care about improving people's lives" by imagining a world where everything is awesome and pretending that it's real!
Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling. They're almost as bad as punch-ballot.
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.
>- 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.
How do you ensure secret ballots when it's printing an opaque identifier (the QR code) on your ballot?
After the elections you sample the ballots to make sure they match. If you find any instances of error, that immediately raises red flags about the entire vote set.
?? In NYS the main process for voting is voter marks their paper ballot and then scans the marked ballot into the “reader” (DS200). Optionally, there is a “marking” machine (Automark) which has accessibility features. But this machine only marks the ballot, and does not read. The marked ballot must still be scanned.
Are you proposing to eliminate the single scanner and have a new machine developed which marks and scans ballots?
If that’s the case, that would be incredibly expensive and greatly slow the voting process. I say this having worked at polls for 15 years.
Also, in the article—
> “…the SAVE Act got a lot of attention […] because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack.”
Some confusion in this, because while a passport may prove citizenship, it is not sufficient to prove eligibility to vote. Why? Because it doesn’t show your address, and eligibility from the Bureau of Elections standpoint is residency in an Assembly District/Election District. IE, you vote where you live because of local candidates and initiatives.
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).
- voters have three chances to vote if they make a mistake, knowingly.
- the Automark helps with accessibility and independence, and you can ask a trusted friend/family member to assist.
As to voters choosing the wrong candidate unknowingly, I don’t see software/hardware changes the problem. Just as easy to made bad design choices here (imho they’re worse than paper).
As to affordability of hardware, that is not clear to me at all. The comparable costs of printed paper ballots and two machines (I think it’s per ED, or 750-1000 ppl in NY), versus 5-6+ units is not obvious.
Like I said, this is addressed by NY state bureau of elections: “… allows a voter with disabilities to privately and independently vote on a paper ballot. Audio and tactile interfaces allow voters with sight challenges to complete their ballot. Voters can listen to the selections over headphones or view an LCD screen with an image of their ballot that can be adjusted for size and contrast. A "Sip-N-Puff", or other compatible personal interface devices may also be used by voters with limited hand dexterity.”
Plain paper ballots work very well in other countries. That would probably need more adjustments in organization though in the US. And we still get fast preliminary results at 6pm the same day.
I think it is obviously on topic for this article specifically highlighting this problem and doubt I'm being downvoted due to some neutral criterion separating 'machine' from 'policy'.
> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
No, it’s a rabbit hole argument that appeals to people who are ignorant of the reality of identity or are fine with disenfranchising people.
Given the context that the federal government is currently rounding up US persons and detaining or exiling them without due process, it’s a doubly asinine argument.
this is much more “argument by free association” than anything i said. i simply said we should have a national ID. the current per-state system is a mess and laughable from the rest of the world
The system is such that there are 6,000 jurisdictions issuing ~20,000 types of birth certificates in the United States. It's a bonkers system, and relying on these breadcrumbs for a fundamental right is awful.
For 80% of people, national ID is a no brainer. The other 20% are the issue, and it's a problem that won't be solved in this framework of government in the US.
We pretty much have those already. The long-term issue is that it's seen as a "states rights" issue and both the more extreme left and right wing political players are against ID for different reasons.
With specific relevance to voting, what happens to the exceptions? 1% of the US population is 3.5M people.
Birth certificate provenance and lack of procedure at birth is only one source of exception. Other examples:
- elderly people who lose access to records
- children whose parents fail to secure documents.
- non-custodial parents who refuse to provide documents to their children
- women whose names change from marriage/divorce
- native americans whose tribal papers
- minors who cannot get required identity documents because their social security card is lost and onerous to replace. (requires in-person appearance and takes 9-24 months)
Voting is a fundamental right. You can establish with high certainty the identity of a individual using easy to obtain proofs. The number of non-citizens voting illegally is a tiny number. This whole controversy is about suppressing the votes of the poor and infirm, as denying their rights has a clear ROI to one of the political parties.
1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.
Which is it?
Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
Well said. Not everything in life is improved by larger scale and efficiency. Certain concerns like counting votes require accuracy and trust in the process, because distrust in the voting process is detrimental to the whole idea of a representative republic.
> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot
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.
It's admittedly a bit difficult because we vote for so many things. President and VP, 2 senate, 2 representatives, then any number of state congressmen(mmost states have their own "senators" but operating within that state only), several district attorneys, mayor, comptroller, and state judges. Even your school board in your district is on the ballot. And lastly, any number of propositions to vote.
It's a big reason I vote from home. Properly researching every candidate on a ballot can legitimately be a full day's work. Spreading that out to a week of iteration helps a lot.
I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.
At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.
“there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US”
Even if you have many companies providing voting machines, it does not deal with the problem of distrust in national elections. Many elections that have recently occurred come down to the votes of a particular small area of the country or district. These districts are likely to be dominated by one voting machine or type of vote machine purchased by the election board at that district. So, effectively you still have a single or a few voting machines determining elections.
> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).
What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
If votes are counted by hand, you have to systematically corrupt hundreds, maybe thousands of people across jurisdictions. With machines you only have to corrupt a single person.
>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.
What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
Great, so I’m sure that you will not complain at all if Democrats lose in the future where a single company controls so many voting machines, unless they are able to prove fraud beyond a reasonable doubt in mere days after the election, right? And you’ll not complain if the vast majority of the suits filed are dismissed on procedural grounds such as standing, right? Because voters and candidates and state attorneys general obviously have no case or controversy in a contested election?
Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
Lots. Anything involving standing at the least, but also many of the “unauthorized people changed the rules without the authority of the state legislature”.
You’ll find similar lists on Wikipedia and at the American Bar Association; they slant their interpretations differently than I do here. Look into a couple of the “standing” or “no merit” cases and see if you really think they were without merit or that there was no “case or controversy” as defined in the Constitution.
Yes, a couple were kooky, particularly around voting machines, but most were “you changed the rules in a way that weakens election security and you are not Constitutionally allowed to do that, since you aren’t the state legislature and the written law is at odds with your rules”.
So I did go ahead and read over the first on your list, claims, Pennsylvania supreme Court ruling, and the district court ruling (super fun reading) and yeah... Not convinced. I won't attempt to summarize everything here because it's a grab bag, which is common with all these election cases. Throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope something sticks. The claims pretty much boil down to X common practice (including many that are common in my state of Idaho, ex mail in ballots, drop boxes, which, weird, no challenges) could lead to fraud and are therefore unconstitutional, under some fuzzily spelled out mechanizm, and we are entitled to ??? (Seriously, no clear cut relief was spelled out for most claims, which is generally a requirement).
Now sure, maybe this is one of the "kooky" ones, but then we are back to, which ones? "Here's a list of 100 cases, read them all" isnt a reasonable ask. Getting a handle on this one was a significant (wasted) time investment. One which I already wasted significant amounts of time on back in 2020-2021.
You claim "most" did not get a fair hearing. It shouldn't be hard to pick one and clearly explain what was unfair about it.
>The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.
So, what you are saying, in essence (and without any examples of the "cast majority" of serious cases that didn't get a fair hearing and that I, and almost everyone, somehow missed), is that there is no real justice system in America.
Well, then it is time to put your money where your mouth is: grab your guns and start a civil war. If there is no justice system, your country is a failed country anyway. You can only kill your way out. There is no other alternative.
Funny that with full control of the Congress, the Senate, the presidency and a completely compliant DOJ and FBI we still haven't seen any proof of anything. It should be an easy case, a home run if you are right, uh?
Or, you know... You may be delusional. Try to give it a thought.
And, notably, Republicans have been making claims of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats since well before Trump, have gotten into state office in part on a message of cracking down on it, followed up with investigations, and come up with... nothing. A handful of "whoopsie" mistakes (still prosecutable, sure, but probably not done on purpose) and the odd one or two actual attempts at individual fraud, with no strong partisan slant. No conspiracy, no rampant fraud 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.
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:
1. voters mark paper ballots
2. observers from all parties watch the counting
3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
That won't stop the election cranks. In the 2020 election there were accusations of election fraud centered around workers "stuffing" ballot boxes or otherwise acting suspiciously.
How did a man/company with annual revenue <$20M/year obtain the capital necessary to purchase a company that has $787M in receivables from the Fox News settlement?
This is less about technology than it is about process. Specifically:
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.
I cant help but notice that most people who are of the opinion that everyone should vote on Election Day, in person, and on a paper ballot that is hand counted, also have an issue with tabulation taking time.
If I had to steelman it, people think the counting should be fast and the verification is based on your ability to attend a polling station on demand. The trust the machine, but not the person.
My charitable interpretation of that is that they have a huge blindside for people who need to work crazy hours, look after kids, or for disabled people who need to do a lot of planning to get to a physical location they don't frequent. Or simply people out of town or country that day (soldiers on tour are a big one, my parents are rarely in town to vote). They are so distrusting of mail they forget that people can't all be expected to be in a single spot for a single day.
Maybe we should just go back to the old school way? It seems like there have been grievances about voting machines for so long and it causes distrust to the entire system. The whole hanging chad issue in the 2000 election is a prime example.
given the money required it seems like it with always be one or the other that owns these? Maybe governments should own the machines (people would still complain)
disclosure, i am biased and think everyone should use paper.
We use paper in Australia and generally have a result by the next day (2010 being an exception due to hung parliament). We also have a very strict chain of ownership and auditible vote counts ledgers, if they're really looking for anti-fraud measures they could come and observe our AEC
In the U.S. each state runs their own part of the federal election.
In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.
I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.
IIR, the US's huge push to (computerized) machine voting was after the 2000 election, when Florida's Democrats demonstrated just how badly they could screw up with paper ballots:
Other countries tend to have only one or two contests, which makes counting easier. In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan. You can still have high confidence in this case if you do a risk-limiting audit.
> Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
No, it doesn't. But there's a wide variety of machines, from comparatively simple, tested-and-true Scantrons to the fancy touch screen Dominion machines with conceptually easier-to-hack software and processes, and plenty of nuance across the board. But I think the author's language is still sloppy, if not downright misleading.
Also, IIRC the purchaser of Dominion has publicly committed to ensuring paper trails for everything, which at least 8 or so years ago was a popular criticism of Dominion machines--what paper receipts it did (or could optionally) produce didn't necessarily provide robust accounting of the overall tabulation system. Beyond being a Trump supporter (which alone says very little about any specific individual), there's no reason to think the new owner would be worse for election integrity than the status quo, and arguably some reason to believe integrity might improve. Only time will tell whether he improves the transparency and integrity of Dominion's products. Though I'm more than a little skeptical, not because of nefarious motives, but just because Dominion's position in the marketplace os providing fancy voting tech. The easiest way to improve integrity might be to just shutdown Dominion's entire voting machine product lineup and tell everybody to move to Scantron paper ballots with hand audits, like California does.
I had some friends who worked in CISA. Had, cause they were fired, RIF'd, early retirement, etc. They have been gutted.
During the Biden campaign, there were a few people doing rudimentary data gathering and election machine investigations. After they announced to their bosses, order came from the top to cease all voting machine research and destroy what they did.
We dont know why the order to cease and destroy was issued. But, yeah. A guess was that the existing players bribe both parties, and bribe was called in.
If you want to snoop more, go look at what Defcon's Election village is doing. Quite a few of those findings were damning.
The ones in my precinct had exposed USB ports accessible to the voter while behind the privacy curtain. There was a lockable door to cover them, but they were left open.
When I pointed it out I was told that it was policy and they couldn't lock them. They didn't even have a key.
The hand-wringing in this article about Republicans signing up election monitors and having lawyers on stand-by is absurd. Both parties pour huge amounts of resources every election into this sort of thing and aggressively pursue it. If you really want integrity in elections you should want interested parties to be able to audit the results and mount legal challenges if they feel it is justified (and, yes, that means all interested parties and not just who you consider to be the "good guys").
That is some serious whataboutism based on the actions in the last election. One side wants people to be able to vote (some mass too loosely), the other side wants to limit voting to people who attend to agree with them and if it fails, simply hold up the results of negative outcomes until the election is effectively decided.
Once the company sells the voting machine to some state or city I would assume the voting machine is not "owned" by the company anymore. I'm also assuming they aren't in any way connected to a network and are all isolated independent systems.
The state should be auditing them prior to using them to see that they work as expected.
Digital voting is not secure and never will be, which is the main reason it exists. Nobody really wants secure elections, they want to win elections. Look at prop 50 for a recent example.
It’s a proposition in the upcoming California election intended to maximally gerrymander state congressional districts to reduce the number of republican legislators at the federal level. It’s a reactionary move in response to Texas redistricting process which removed some blue team congress folks in their state.
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.
I may be wrong about the total raised so far, different ai responses bounce around greatly on the total raised and spent so far, and of course it’s impossible to know exactly given so much “dark money” in politics today, but even very leftwardly biased ai responses list Newsom as one of the few major backers. I suppose it’s money from his 2022 gubernatorial fund mostly but you’ll admit 2022 has come and gone? (Maybe you won’t!)
And if you think Newsom doesn’t have presidential ambitions, and that his path to the White House doesn’t depend quite critically on passage of prop 50, you either aren’t paying attention to the full arc of Gavin’s career or being overtly dishonest.
Edit: Indeed my total was off by about 2x, but my general point stands the proposition in detrimental to California’s political power in Washington because it reduces the state’s representation in the GOP power structure, while mostly benefitting Newsom’s presidential ambitions. If you can’t see that I don’t know how to help you.
> it reduces the state’s representation in the GOP power structure
Compared to now, where the GOP power drained the reservoirs, seized the states national guard without authorization to roam the streets and then migrate to Oregon, and overall labeling the state as everything wrong with thr democratic party? How much did it cost the state or federal to pull off all those stunts?
The redistricting goes back to normal during the 2030 census, and clearly the state needs to work fast against these clear oversteps in power against it. This really isn't the time to play moderatism. The GOP power hasn't these past 9 months. 300m in advertising to make sure the people know this is chump change for the 4th largest economy.
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Now all that said, how is advertising for a ballot initiative on any way "rigged"? Even if you think it's dumb and harmful, this is going by thr books, which says the people get to vote on any amendments to the state constitution. Where's the foul play here?
Look, most of the work of state congressional reps is getting pork approved and garnering federal funds for the state. If you cannot understand that and grasp how having representatives in both groups helps the state then I can’t help you.
Prop 50 is bad for the state as a whole. It is also undemocratic but let’s not pretend that matters to those involved. Those involved in this who work for the state (people like Gavin) should care about the fate of the state they are supposedly working for more than their own presidential ambitions, no? Especially when that person has little chance of winning at the national level because they do really stupid things like prop 50.
>. If you cannot understand that and grasp how having representatives in both groups helps the state then I can’t help you.
So you're fine with one group kowtowing to the other to "help the state", as one group is illegally withholding congressionally allocated funds on their own whim? L
et's stop being coy and just say what you really think of the current atmosphere as of late. Are you personally done with Unitary Executive Theory in action? If you approve of that then just say Al instead of pretending that we're in a government that is functioning democratically.
>It is also undemocratic but let’s not pretend that matters to those involved.
Let's put it in a more extreme way. If war breaks out and we had a ballot to give the president plenary powers until the war concludes l, is that not still democratic if it is voted for? The action weakens democracy, yes. but the power of democracy includes the ability to dismantle it, As long as that is the will of the voters.
So I see prop 50 as the exact tools of democracy being used. In this case as a way to recognize that everyone else broke the glass illegally, so people doing it "the right way" vote to break the glass.
>Those involved in this who work for the state (people like Gavin) should care about the fate of the state they are supposedly working for more than their own presidential ambitions, no?
What do you think the fate of the state is if it doesn't redistricting, given the event described above? You're being very accusational but aren't addressing the fact that the federal government is in fact attacking the state.
You haven't actually told me anything bad about prop 50 except that "it's undemocratic" and that you think it's stupid. I address the democratic part. If people want to vote for stupid stuff, that is also democratic. We did so in 2024 nationals.
It's OK because voting machines are always correct and voting fraud never happens, especially not late at night in Georgia when all the observers have been sent home, or while windows are being covered so observers can't see in.
Slightly tangential question: Why doesn't the government "own" the intellectual property for their citizens to vote?
I'm all for free markets and capitalism, but I think its not clear to me why some fundamental responsibilities and operations of the government can be contracted out. Is there a way this make sense to anyone?
Snopes has this as mixed because Stalin may or may not have expressed this sentiment at some point, but it seems impossibly unlikely to me that this pun works in Russian as it does in English.
Can somebody point out the "MAGA Oligarch" link here? Scott Leiendecker is a former Republican election official, and the linked article says the company is "repped by" (presumably a PR agency?) that uses Trumpian imagery, but that seems to be the extent of the connection.
(I know that already might seem a lot to some people, but I was wondering if there was anything to justify the title beyond that.)
10 years ago, this wouldn't be a concern at all. I feel like something changed inside the US government since then. Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian who previously tried to manipulate an election became president, and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from, bought a voting machine company.
Ugh - OK, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve in this thread.
I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.
From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.
I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:
> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian
Agree. No notes.
> who previously tried to manipulate an election
I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
> became president,
Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.
> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,
A couple of points here.
First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.
We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.
> bought a voting machine company.
Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?
> I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.
It was almost certainly Trump's intent to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I do not see why else he and his personal lawyers would go through such convoluted efforts to do all of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Trying to intuit Trump's state of mind is always a funny game that is played when discussing whether or not he lost the 2020 election, but you often end up with two possibilities: 1. Trump is a sane person who is lying about the results of the 2020 election to rile up his base (very plausible) or 2. Trump is a delusional person who willfully ignored the advice of his Vice President and Attorney General (less plausible, but even more highly concerning given this person was voted into office twice).
> First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.
One note: I don't think this is right. Trump did very-swiftly take over the party, but not because of Obama and Biden. Republicans and Republican-friendly rich dudes and organizations deliberately built up a propaganda machine after Nixon, and that machine molded an electorate very far right with the aim of ensuring they'd always vote against Democrats—but to support a party that shared very little of their cultivated electorate's far-right aims.
I have also spent a lot of time in red areas and come from a mostly-red family, and typical Republican politicians from Reagan on traditionally have talked a pretty unconvincing game and really just run a pro-(big, monopolist)business/pro-rich party when in office. They could depend on their captive electorate because they'd convinced them the democrats wanted to give illegal immigrants jobs grabbing Republican voters' guns while funding their free abortions with taxpayer dollars and handing the US government over to the UN or something (this is, for readers not familiar with this crowd, a glib presentation but not really an exaggeration of the kind of thing these folks really do worry will happen when Democrats get in office, and probably the least-accurate part of that passage is that Republicans might think Democrats would give illegal immigrants jobs rather than just tons of free money to illegally-vote for Democrats or something like that—that this stuff hasn't happened when Democrats have gotten in office doesn't seem to register as meaningful to them, for some reason)
Trump started talking like a Republican voter, not a Republican politician. "Why don't they just build a wall?" "What does NATO do for us?" "Why don't we just ship illegals out wherever we find them, the constitution doesn't apply to them, probable cause doesn't apply, et c." (dip a toe in social media outside left-wing bubbles and you'll see a truly alarming amount of stuff like that latter sentiment) and disturbing support for military action in "lawless democrat cities", "democratic politicians are all constantly doing crimes up to and including secret murders, we should prosecute all of them"—this is shit their media has been telling them is true and good for decades, Trump's just the first option they've had who's crazy enough to act on any of it. You could hear it on AM radio in the '90s, you could overhear it in a rural diner in the '00s, no problem. This is who their voters are, and have been since before Obama, before Biden, and even before Trump.
He took the party over by exploiting a weakness the party itself had spent enormous resources and decades developing in cynically seeking a powerful tool against the Democrats. Their plan worked really well, but left them vulnerable to the first person positioned to credibly claim to want to do all the stuff Republican voters have been told they should want, but denied by their Republican politicians (because a whole bunch of the ideas are wasteful, insane, totally pointless, or extremely dangerous to democracy or the rule of law, so, to economic stability)
For people who have lived decades in red America before Trump, when he started talking, I think a lot of us saw he was dangerous pretty fast. Not because he was saying crazy shit we'd never heard before, but because he was saying crazy shit we'd heard all the time.
I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :)
I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. Trump and his admin are emboldened, and what little resistance there was to domestic actions just… dissolved.
> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right.
I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.
I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored.
It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.
Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.
Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win.
There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
No-one is truly neutral in this scenario. The previous owners Staple Street Capital are headed up by a bunch of guys from The Carlyle Group. Harvey Schwartz, CEO of the Carlyle Group was a big Biden guy.
If there was no fraud, and all the recent elections were secure then this wouldn’t matter.
My contention has always been that until we see the basis of identity secured like Estonia/CAC/PIV/Passports through strong identity proofing and robust processes, we are not ready to talk about the Pandora’s box that is voting machines.
It is. That's why companies like palantir want to do it in the shadows. They will get our info either way, as they have people who's full time job is to ensure so.
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If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.