Said Tammy Patrick, the chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials, quoted in "Latest strategy in fighting election skepticism: Radical transparency" (WaPo)(free-access link).
September 24, 2024
"We know there are people who are going to take things that they see out of context to bolster or inform their own narrative..."
"... and that is part of the tension with being super transparent: It potentially leaves you vulnerable for misunderstanding in a moment when we know that absolutely any function in election administration can be weaponized."
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How can anything be more transparent than... transparent?
Paper ballots, no mail in, day of the election only. Paper can be counted quickly because if there are a lot of votes, there are also available a lot of volunteers. It scales with population.
No machine can be trusted where there is a large motivation to cheat. The machine doesn't necessarily do what its code says it does because it depends on more than its code - it depends on its software history, none of which is available to check.
ISTM that in the end there's no way to guarantee no fraud or abuse. But there are ways to make elections MORE secure and auditable, and any election reform proposal that has the opposite effect should, in my opinion, have to mount a very robust defense indeed in order to be justifiable.
"Some people, up to 1% of the population, have trouble getting to a polling place" is not sufficient to justify universal mail-in balloting as in Washington State, in my view. Lots of things discommode people, yet they do them anyway - often a lot more frequently than once a year. And I do believe absentee ballots should be available for those with a legitimate need, as judged by a reasonable person.
Lying liars lie and lie,
Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
If you don't want election results questioned, don't have a system that leads to questions about election results.
Also a thumb marked with indelible ink to prevent voting in multiplicity and by proxy. That would be radical democracy that is wholly unacceptable to Democrats and an axis of election officials.
who ever thought of computerizing elections wanted to conceal details
Exactly. The only way to fight suspicion is to approve voter integrity measures, which are really just all the things we did before Democrats made it a priority to dismantle them. All the things that would get you assholes out of the pickle you are in are the things you need to ‘win’ the election. Now you’re stuck with the steal and the people who know you stole it…again.
What rh said. 👆🏽
Transparency is good. It would be even better if they demonstrated on video how votes are counted and address some of the possible vectors for fraud. For example, how are hundreds of thousands of signatures verified on mail in ballots? What happens if a ballot run through a machine multiple times? What happens if the same ballot is run through multiple machines? How are vote tallies relayed to the central elections board? How do they ensure against duplicate counts? What happens if someone sends in a ballot and then tries to vote in person? What is ballot curing? How are voter rolls maintained? How are provisional ballots verified? These are just a few off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's more. It's not enough to say "trust us." They need to demonstrate it.
Paper ballots are still counted with a machine. They could be recounted by hand, but where I live, I mark a paper ballot, then feed it into a machine. There's a recount available if the vote is close enough, but the results you get on election night are based on the machine.
Early voting, mail-in voting, drop-off boxes, weak ID reqs are inherently non-transparent.
Yup. Although Hobbs found a way to cheat herself into office anyway.
Don’t cover the windows at the vote counting center with sheets.
Don’t cover the windows at the vote counting center with sheets.
The Professor has a decent response to this.
The fundamental problem is that once a ballot is received it is impossible (and ISTM should be) to verify that a specific ballot was marked by a valid voter. This is the root of questions arising whenever ballots are distributed and marked outside a secure location such as absentee voting, vote-by-mail, and drop boxes. All introduced a delay between verification of the voter, marking the ballot, and collecting the ballot, reorder the process, or introduce additional handling.
No count is going to be 100% accurate so the issue isn't really with tabulation. It's with insuring that ballots are only marked by valid voters.
Hey yo got a guy who wants to be King and says you wont have to worry about voting again..So there you go,,,Yes paper ballots still go thru a machine,,voting 101
There is a recount available. That's important.
And of course, if you can't trust a machine's programming, you also can't trust volunteers' accuracy or lack of personal agenda - though a volunteer can't affect the count as much as a machine.
They have shown an odd attititude to transparency
Not in Puerto Rico, Ann. Not before 2020 anyway. All 9 million ballots were counted by hand. At least 3 times. Once before they left the voting room where maybe 1000 people voted, recounted again before they left the polling place with a dozen rooms. Then again in San Juan where all ballots were sent for final count.
3 million or so voters, each casting 3 ballots (city, district for senator etc and state for gov)
Polls closed at 2, results started coming in at about 5-6PM from San Juan based on tally sheets from polling places. Final, unofficial though seldom changed, count by 10PM or so. Final official count took a week or 2 to certify officially.
VERY limited absentee voting. Early voting started at about 6AM on election day for people like police, shut-ins, poll workers and such and were in person. About 95% of all votes were cast at the polls between 10AM and 2PM in person.
On paper ballots
With dedicated voter ID cards
Verification against voter lists
Inked index fingers with proprietary UV ink checked on entrance and exit from polling room.
And I've never heard a joke here about dead people voting or election fraud.
But we are just dumb Puerto Ricans. What do we know about elections?
John Henry
There is a recount available, and there is the evidence for an audit function, as well - provided it isn't destroyed.
Recounts are a red herring. Counting the same ballots 50 times produces the same result.
With respect, you miss the point because you are an honest person. Paper ballots allow the counts to be checked; are the number of ballots equal to the number of voters? Do signatures match? Stuff like that.
Get help immediately.
Once the chain of custody is broken, anything goes. States should minimize the use of absentee ballots, not expand it.
The machine is just for convenience. The paper ballot is the official vote and it controls in the event of a dispute.
"Radical transparency." Is that what obfuscation is called these days?
The only thing that is super transparent is that the system is un-auditable and therefore the results are un-verifiable. If they (whoever they is) wanted the system to be trusted they would design a system that could be audited where each vote could be traced back to the individual voter. And that voter could be verified as eligible, voted in the correct state, and didn't vote anywhere else.
Ann Althouse said...
"Paper ballots are still counted with a machine. They could be recounted by hand, but where I live, I mark a paper ballot, then feed it into a machine. There's a recount available if the vote is close enough, but the results you get on election night are based on the machine."
True, but there also must be preservation of the original voting records, including chain of custody, with no spoilation of evidence, before the results are certified, or in the event of a dispute, before the dispute is adjudicated.
Chain of custody is more difficult with drop boxes and even with mail-in ballots - can USPS validate that the voter, and not another person, dropped off a ballot at the post office?
MIT did a study on the issues with mail-in voting, here, but they revised it after 2016. I saved a pdf of the original just in case, back in the day. Jimmy Carter also commented on the dangers of mail-in voting, examined in a Wall Street Journal editorial, here, though the WSJ has walked that back more recently.
What does it matter if the process of counting votes is transparent, when the process of harvesting the mail in ballots is unauditable, the voters whose votes are supposedly mailed in cannot be proven to have filled out their mail in ballots, the mail in ballots can be harvested - even created - in a partisan fashion by political operatives, and the votes are still "legal" in that they are counted? Transparency at one end of the process is pure BS. Make the votes that are counted be proven to be made by the individuals whose names are on the envelopes, not a paid flunky for the Party.
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