The system is a whole bunch of people from different parties being present when votes are collected and counted. And with paper ballots you need to do the fraud in many different polling stations.
It is possible to do small-scale fraud with paper ballots, you can never fully eliminate that option. But it is exceedingly hard to do larger scale fraud without it being extremely obvious to any observer.
Yes, and it's incredible how many problems are solved by hand-counted paper ballots. I get that it's a big task, that it takes time (and some US administrations seem to despise not knowing election results the night of the election), and that it's very tempting to automate, but the basic formula of 1) everyone gets a paper ballot; 2) the ballots are collected at a polling station; 3) the ballots are counted by hand is much harder to corrupt. Maybe build the fancy stuff on top of the paper ballot, like serialized ballots to prevent duplication or timed locks on ballot boxes to prevent tampering, but for the love of Democracy, keep it simple!
These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.)
Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical systems, people had to count ballots by hand. There were many fewer people voting then, and regardless, that's not really the point: they counted by hand because they had no alternative.
Electronic voting certainly brings new problems into the mix. I don't think those problems are insurmountable. The problem isn't the technology itself. It's the legal and social landscape around voting technology. Open source, with reproducible builds and a method to verify that the code running on a machine was built from a particular version of source, is a start. Verification of that software's functionality, on par with the verification done of critical software (medical devices, things that go into space, slot machines, etc.) would be another good move.
Voters can also receive paper receipts, and I'm sure we can come up with some sort of scheme to take a representative sample of the electronically-recorded votes and validate them against the paper receipts, while maintaining voter privacy.
The absolute number of people doesn't matter. If you have more people voting, you can have more people counting. If you have more people, you have more polling stations, you can keep the size of them constant no matter your total population.
Other countries do paper ballots and manual counting without issues. The US isn't that special or unusual.
There is too much power at stake and too many dollars in the mix for this to work. Take a look at how expensive it is to break electronic voting machines then compare that to the billions of dollars that flow into an election cycle.
it’s called distributed voting centers, there’s this many people so there’s plenty of people available who can count their block’s ballots, there’s no motive of convenience in using electronics for voting that could ever surpass the motive for simplicity and trust, it’s just not that hard of a thing, there was no new problem that suddenly emerged when electronics became available for this, this notion should inform you of the various motives of why someone started to market them to decision makers
I rent VPS's in a data center and run services on them. I feel like I'm self-hosting. The days of me running a server in my own home are long gone. I don't want to deal with the power requirements, the noise, or the hardware.
I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.
I wish people who said things like this, or who believed that Trump is/was a Russian agent could see how silly and racist they look. America's problems are not caused by foreigners. They're caused by Americans.
The xenophobia exhibited by sentiments such as this simply demonstrate hatred and ignorance of the world outside of the USA, and demonstrate an incapacity to critically evaluate American culture and history.
I am not Xenophobic of Russia. I speak and read Russian and my partner is Russian. I also don’t hate the world outside of the USA. In have lived in that world for more than ten years. I simply think that trump is a patsy. Whether he knows he is or not doesn’t matter. Putin plays him like a fiddle.
That being said, I absolutely completely agree with you that American problems are caused by Americans.
Russia has puppet states and is actively working on building them. Russia is actively trying to influence elections in foreign countries too. Trump being suspect Russian puppet is not xenofobia, it is completely consistent with what Russia is and who Trump is.
That aside, US electorates has decided to award another term for Trump. FYI at that point Trump is not an unknown dark horse candidate anymore and he even won the popular vote. Last time a GOP president won popular vote was 20 years ago.
So it's very fair to attribute the so called erraticness to what American want in general instead of attributing it to Putin or other non American.
Completely consistent with what Russia is? Sure. With who Trump is? I'm not sure that I see it. Trump does not strike me as the kind of guy who would willingly be someone else's puppet.
Unwillingly? Sure. Being played? Sure. Knowingly being a puppet? No.
He acts like Putins puppet. I can see it both willingly and unwillingly. Trump admires powerful dictators and wants their validation. Putin is one. Also, I would not be surprised at all if there was unwilling component too.
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