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The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduc

by z3phyr 8y ago

The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.

Klathmon 8y ago
> That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. Are you really implying that pushing a voting machine button is more intuitive and "absolute" than using a pencil to mark a box on a piece of paper? Have you seen these voting machines? The ones I've used before in PA were wildly complicated, and while I was there waiting to vote 2 different people had to call someone in to help them vote correctly. >people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time The beauty of a well run paper ballot system, is that if you don't trust the counters, you can go count along with them. If you don't trust someone to not tamper with the box, you can go watch it all day. If you think the "other team" is trying to pull one over on you, you can get all of your friends to go down and watch the box all day, and count along. It doesn't matter their age, their primary language, their knowledge or the amount of schooling they went to, everyone capable of voting is capable of verifying those votes. I personally am not arguing that it's impossible to rig a paper ballot system, just that it's significantly more costly (to the point that it would probably be easier to just run for the position legally if you are going to sink that much money into it), and it's magnitudes harder to get away with. Let's look at florida, a state with a population of about 20 million. In 2016 9.4 million votes were cast. Let's look at one county, st. johns county. There were 136,000 votes cast in that county across about 46 precincts. So let's assume even distribution and say about 3000 votes cast per precinct. In order to sway the election in one county, in one state, in one election, you would need to pay off or threaten around 46 people, probably a lot more. And you'd have to make sure that not one of them makes a mistake or "comes clean", and that nobody in any of the precincts you are trying to rig will sit around and decide to watch the process and blow the whistle at the first sign of something shady. And even if you were able to sway that county, you have another 66 in florida alone, and another 3000 or so across the rest of the country. Now I know a "smart" way to rig would only touch "swing states", and would be smart with where they spend their money and time on to maximize the impact, but you are still talking about thousands of people all across the country. If there were impending cases of rigging, they were found because it's monumentally difficult to cover up something on that scale.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  > Have you seen these voting machines? It's a fairly safe assumption that a person from India, where EVMs have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, with the first fully-EVM general election almost a decade and a half ago in 2004, has seen an electronic voting machine. (-: Ironically, the argument that you make about how hard it is to rig a paper election is exactly the same as the argument that the supporters of EVMs and the ECI make about how hard it is to rig the EVM system. It claims that there are roughly 1.5 million machines that one would have to tamper with, randomly assigned to voting stations (which one would have to predict ahead of time), and monitored by canditates' electoral agents and the police all of whom you would have to threaten/bribe. You're both making the same argument.

by z3phyr 8y ago

Klathmon 8y ago

> That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. Are you really implying that pushing a voting machine button is more intuitive and "absolute" than using a pencil to mark a box on a piece of paper? Have you seen these voting machines? The ones I've used before in PA were wildly complicated, and while I was there waiting to vote 2 different people had to call someone in to help them vote correctly. >people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time The beauty of a well run paper ballot system, is that if you don't trust the counters, you can go count along with them. If you don't trust someone to not tamper with the box, you can go watch it all day. If you think the "other team" is trying to pull one over on you, you can get all of your friends to go down and watch the box all day, and count along. It doesn't matter their age, their primary language, their knowledge or the amount of schooling they went to, everyone capable of voting is capable of verifying those votes. I personally am not arguing that it's impossible to rig a paper ballot system, just that it's significantly more costly (to the point that it would probably be easier to just run for the position legally if you are going to sink that much money into it), and it's magnitudes harder to get away with. Let's look at florida, a state with a population of about 20 million. In 2016 9.4 million votes were cast. Let's look at one county, st. johns county. There were 136,000 votes cast in that county across about 46 precincts. So let's assume even distribution and say about 3000 votes cast per precinct. In order to sway the election in one county, in one state, in one election, you would need to pay off or threaten around 46 people, probably a lot more. And you'd have to make sure that not one of them makes a mistake or "comes clean", and that nobody in any of the precincts you are trying to rig will sit around and decide to watch the process and blow the whistle at the first sign of something shady. And even if you were able to sway that county, you have another 66 in florida alone, and another 3000 or so across the rest of the country. Now I know a "smart" way to rig would only touch "swing states", and would be smart with where they spend their money and time on to maximize the impact, but you are still talking about thousands of people all across the country. If there were impending cases of rigging, they were found because it's monumentally difficult to cover up something on that scale.

JdeBP 8y ago
> Have you seen these voting machines? It's a fairly safe assumption that a person from India, where EVMs have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, with the first fully-EVM general election almost a decade and a half ago in 2004, has seen an electronic voting machine. (-: Ironically, the argument that you make about how hard it is to rig a paper election is exactly the same as the argument that the supporters of EVMs and the ECI make about how hard it is to rig the EVM system. It claims that there are roughly 1.5 million machines that one would have to tamper with, randomly assigned to voting stations (which one would have to predict ahead of time), and monitored by canditates' electoral agents and the police all of whom you would have to threaten/bribe. You're both making the same argument.