…
The push to hand-count ballots is ramping up, albeit with spotty success, as the 2024 election nears, according to a review by the Guardian and Votebeat. If more localities decide to try hand-counting in the November election, results could be inaccurate, untrustworthy or delayed, fostering more distrust in elections. In places that opt not to hand-count, supporters of the practice could use this choice as a reason to question or refuse to sign off on certification.
Either way, it raises the risk of throwing the 2024 election into chaos.
“It just gives additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” said Heather Sawyer, executive director at American Oversight. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”
The push hasn’t gained much ground in the large swing counties where Trump claimed votes were stolen from him. It’s been more effective in small or rural counties that voted heavily for Trump, where conservative activists have lined up at public meetings to repeat the conspiracies of Cook, Lindell and others. There – in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin – local officials voted to give hand-counting ballots a try in either their midterm or presidential primary elections.
Theoretically, but in actuality the software is written by incompetent companies and there’s a much higher potential to interfere maliciously.
Hand counting our elections is worth the effort… even if this particular push is a disingenuous effort to muddy the election results. This is a “broken clock is right twice a day” situation.
Not necessarily true. Sure code is easy to mess up, source I work as a software engineer, but it’s also easy to proofread. An open source government sponsored vote counting software could easily be implemented. Heck the data base without personal identifying information could be made public for people to compare results on local builds of the software.
As a fellow software engineer, please realize that open SSH is used by pretty much everyone and had several severe security issues for decades. Open source software is much more secure than closed source but if the pool of people reviewing the software in detail is small and the stakes are high then it’ll be much cheaper for a foreign actor to expend 10 million per person for bribery or blackmail for a few dozen people then trying to infiltrate hundreds of municipalities.
I make software, I’ve been in this industry for decades and it’s awesome - this isn’t a problem space where it’s a good solution.
Voting machines seem like a solution in search of a problem. Yes. We can do it, maybe we can even do it well. But that doesn’t make it better than paper ballots.