Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?"
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tl;dr version: "Beware the hackers, oh, no, never mind. It's all fine."
I'm not claiming that there was hacking, etc. Simply pointing out how, in a matter of 8 days the narrative changed.
Millions of voters going to the polls Tuesday will cast their ballots on machines blasted as unreliable and inaccurate for two decades by computer scientists from Princeton University to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Toyed with by white-hat hackers and targeted for scathing reviews from secretaries of state in California and Ohio, Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, have startled Illinois voters by flashing the word "Republican" at the top of a ballot and forgotten what day it was in South Carolina. They were questioned in the disappearance of 12,000 votes in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, in 2002 and 18,000 votes in Sarasota County, Florida, in 2006.
“Antiquated, seriously flawed and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination and attack,” U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote of Georgia's aging DRE system before ordering the state to replace it in 2019.
“No one is using a computer they purchased in the 1990s,” said Warren Stewart, senior editor and data specialist for Verified Voting, a nonprofit advocacy group tracking election systems. But voters in more than 300 counties and 12,000 precincts will be casting ballots using DRE technology already aging in the 1990s, when flash drives were bleeding-edge tech and Netscape Navigator was the next new thing.
Nov 11, 2020: [Nah, nothing to worry about.] (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/14/fact-check-dominion-voting-machines-didnt-delete-switch-votes/6282157002/)
A national coalition announced Thursday that there is no evidence that any voting software deleted or changed votes in last week's election, per USA TODAY.
In fact, the security group — which includes the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors — described the election as "the most secure in American history."
"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the coalition concluded.
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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@mik said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
No. It's not like that at all. Billions and billions of dollars and man hours were poured into averting the Y2K issue. Nothing like that happened here.
See https://www.eac.gov/payments-and-grants/election-security-funds for federal money appropriated for election security. You can look up additional state appropriations if you wish.
The point is the experts who work closely with the systems examined the systems and largely found that the systems worked fine -- the various bad things people thought might happen have been shown to have largely been averted.
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Nah, Ax is full-o-shit, but he just won't admit it. Turkey's elections are fairer and more transparent than ours. That's not a complement.
Even Jimmy Carter has said that mail-in ballots are very susceptible to fraud. Except in very limited circumstances, we simply don't need them.
We do badly need an election system that is fair, verifiable and safe, unless we wish to install permanent scepticism in the results. When free people no longer believe their elections are not fair, bad things happen.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
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@axtremus said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
@jolly said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
Even Jimmy Carter has said that mail-in ballots are very susceptible to fraud.
It’s nice to see you give credence to President Carter’s pronouncements.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
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@axtremus said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
@jolly said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
It really depends on the technology and the failure mode.
When did they invent digital clocks?
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@jolly said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
When did they invent digital clocks?
@Jolly the digital clock is but one example that breaks your "a broken clock is right twice a day" saying. Even with older, decidedly analog, time indicating technologies, there are failure modes that render the "a broken clock is right twice a day" saying inapplicable. Take, for example, a sundial with a bent or missing 'stick', it would not tell the right time twice a day.
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In England, a sundial is right about once a month.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525.
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@doctor-phibes said in Nov 2, 2020: "Is your ballot safe?":
In England, a sundial is right about once a month.
Well, that's better than Ax....
