16 ms·

Georgia’s 127k Missing Votes, Disproportionate to African American Neighborhoods

204 points by mcgwiz 8y ago

AlphaWeaver 8y ago
People have said it before, and it will be said again, but until we have much more accountability and transparency, electronic voting machines are NOT to be trusted and should not be used in any official capacity.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  Paper ballots disappear too though, don't they? What do you do when elections are expensive and you detect an error, and you can't find who cast the ballot?
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    What problem are you trying to solve? It sounds like you want to make perfection the enemy of the good.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Disappearing a lot of paper ballots requires a lot of people working together and a lot of planning, making it more likely someone will talk and giving investigators a better chance of figuring out what went wrong. It also increases the odds of an incriminating paper trail being made of the activities. The fundamental difference between computer systems and paper systems is that the effort required to corrupt a computer system is mostly unrelated to the size of the corruption. Paper systems require a lot more effort for a large effect.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      Why do paper systems require more effort to hack? People just have to be able to predict where close elections are located and botch a few elections. The incentive to do so is everywhere. There have been so many close elections in modern memory. What do you do when you detect anomaly? Have an unpalatably expensive recount? That can be expensive enough to use as a reliable weapon. How do you know if the final count is complete? Do you track down every voter? These things sound expensive enough to simply not happen. Instead one side detects enough anomaly for a court to intervene, and the court considers blunt options or leaving the results as-is. For things like Bush v Gore the court is under enormous pressure to act quickly and perfectly, and they voted along party lines.
      - specialist 8y ago
        The gold standard for election integrity is the Australian ballot (private voting, public counting), where ballots are issued & cast at poll sites, and tabulated on site when the polls close. In my jurisdiction, trust is built on mutual distrust. Every receipt, seal, report, lock had to be handled and signed off by members of opposing parties. Sure, it's possible to corrupt poll site based elections. But you have to corrupt many sites. You'd also have to corrupt upstream and downstream actors as well. Super unlikely to go unnoticed.
  - macintux 8y ago
    It is resource-intensive yet viable to track every paper ballot throughout the process. Digital ballots have no such guarantees. The best option to me seems to be scanned paper ballots, which offers the ability to perform analog recounts when there is suspicion of problems with the digital count. (Disclaimer: only a distant observer of this, there may be better options.)
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      For context like 2018 congressional elections, or 2020 elections, what does it mean to track down paper ballots, such as to make sure the final count is complete? At least it sounds like de-anonymizing votes. Or does it mean it's so logistically unpalatable that you can bet on it not happening? Same thing with recount as a remedy to detected anamoly; it's theoretically possible. But is it so unpalatable that a gambler may gamble well on an event?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - specialist 8y ago
    I worked as a poll inspector. Typically, there are ballot accountability reports. eg 100 ballots printed for election day. 50 ballots issued, 49 ballots cast, 1 ballot spoiled, 50 unused ballots. 100 ballots returned to election HQ (central count). Adding or removing ballots from poll site based elections would be noticed. I can't speak to (all) other jurisdictions, so YMMV.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  It's also important to note that the most effective forms of voter suppression are the ones that prevent people from voting in the first place. No amount (or lack thereof) of technology matters if you get wrongly purged off the voter rolls.
  - burfog 8y ago
    An equivalent to being wrongly purged is when somebody voting the other way is wrongly not purged.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      That’s usually not true. Most people are purged because they’re supposedly dead or moved. Those people usually aren’t voting (in that location) anyway, so failing to purge them does little. Even for people who might actually vote there, such as felons or non-citizens, they face severe legal consequences for voting when they’re not allowed to, even if registered, so they usually won’t vote either. Incorrectly purging people is way worse than incorrectly not purging people.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      That is extremely rare in most places, however.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      No, it's not. People have a right to vote. As with criminal prosecutions, the standard should be very high to remove that right from someone - mistakes are a big deal. In some states, the standard for purging has been intentionally made overly strict - "Hyphenated-Name" doesn't match the "Hyphenated Name" the state has on file, so they get purged. It helps when the Secretary of State making the rules is also running for Governor: https://www.politifact.com/georgia/article/2018/oct/19/georgias-exact-match-law-and-its-impact-voters-gov/ https://www.politifact.com/georgia/article/2018/oct/19/georg... > Minority voters are more likely statistically to have names with hyphens or suffixes or other punctuation that can make it more difficult to match their name in databases, experts noted. That makes them more likely to get caught up in the "exact match" law.
temp1928384 8y ago
I can track my mail in ballot (as a resident of SF) on the SF elections website...one reason among many why I prefer vs going in-person.
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
For anyone who didn't follow the Georgia Governor's race last November, it featured Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State running against Stacey Abrams, the Democratic Minority Leader of the GA House of Representatives, who happens to be African-American. The race was decided by a margin of about 55,000 votes in Kemp's favor. Kemp, as Secretary of State, was in charge of Georgia state elections, which presented a conflict of interest for him as he sought higher office. Kemp implemented a voter suppression policy called "exact match," which helped to severely complicate the voting process for about 53,000 Georgians, 80% of whom were people of color. More info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppression-problem-goes-much-deeper-than-brian-kemp/2018/10/20/67dab6c2-cd9b-11e8-a3e6-44daa3d35ede_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppr... Also, voter fraud basically does not exist in the United States as per this article from the Brennan Center: https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud... In fact, the most notable example of election fraud in the United States in recent memory is in NC's 9th Congressional District, where it looks like the Republican in the race cheated his way to victory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_congressional_district_election#Refusal_of_certification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_co... edit: as burlesona rightly points out below, the article to which this comment is attached is about the Lt. Gov.'s race. My comment is about the general lack of integrity in Georgia's elections, and the deeply undemocratic (small-D) results that emerge from this state of affairs.
- burlesona 8y ago
  Note that this article says the missing votes are specifically in the Lieutenant Governor race, not the general ballot - ie. they’re not saying this affected the governorship. The article says many people reported software glitches where the Lt. Governor ballot item did not display or work correctly, which matches their findings that there were a lot less vost cast than expected for that specific race.
  - basilgohar 8y ago
    I greatly appreciate this clarification, not to imply anyone was trying to mislead, but this information helped me better understand what was actually being said, whereas the description by GP may have led me to believe something else (not intentionally). Having said that, the explanation by OP does add significantly to the general case of the integrity of the whole process in Georgia being suspect and need review to ensure the rights of all voters are guaranteed. Otherwise, the process is more obviously a farce than even before and will sow discontent even further.
pizza 8y ago
If I were the one overseeing the election while also running for governor (as Brian Kemp was, and now, successfully attained), I would do everything in my power to make the election be as transparently fair as possible. But as far as this Californian can tell, that was definitely not the case: 1. the voting machines used were known well in advance to be badly vulnerable [0]: He said hackers could infect election computers by first gaining access to a state employee’s computer, possibly by tricking him or her into clicking on a dangerous link in an email. Once the malware is on one machine, it could reach central election systems through internal networks, USB devices or memory cards. J. Alex Halderman prepares to demonstrate Monday at Georgia Tech how easy it is to hack Georgia’s electronic voting machines. In a hypothetical election, Halderman changed a 2-2 vote between George Washington and Benedict Arnold to make Arnold the winner by 3-1. Election computers could also be subverted in person, by someone like a janitor or a temporary worker, Halderman said. Individual voting machines could be tampered with if someone unlocked the latch that protects the memory card port. 2. He reported security researchers (hired by state Democrats) to the FBI for trying to 'hack the system' [1], whereas... In 2015, Kemp’s office inadvertently released the Social Security numbers and other identifying information of millions of Georgia voters. His office blamed a clerical error. [...]His office made headlines again last year after security experts disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed until six months after it was first reported to election authorities. Personal data was again exposed for Georgia voters — 6.7 million at the time — as were passwords used by county officials to access files. <eyeroll/> 3. Georgia implemented a use-it-or-lose-it policy for voting. People found out that because they didn't vote in the past that they had been purged from the register of voters. That's insane to me, but apparently the Supreme Court determined it was constitutional. Georgia also implemented extremely strict name-matching (i.e. make sure that you did not use a hyphen when writing your name one place and a space when writing it in another, because then they won't match). [2] But voting rights advocates fear that “use it or lose it” purges could be used as a voter suppression tactic — along with voter ID requirements, gerrymandering, polling place changes or closures, and registration obstacles — that often help conservative candidates, because infrequent voters tend to be younger, poorer and people of color who are more likely to favor Democrats. For instance, the APM Reports investigation found that such purges in Ohio disproportionately affected urban, Democratic-leaning counties. [0] https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how-hack-elections-georgia-electronic-voting-machines/K4s5F935330BS6fGDm3CVI/ https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how-... [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election-security-charges-in-georgias-governors-race https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election... [2] https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from-voter-rolls-report/ https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from...
burlesona 8y ago
Important context from the executive summary that is missing from the headline: - the missing votes are from the Lt. Governors race only, not the total ballot - many people reported software glitches with that specific ballot item - the study blames faulty programming and insists the state not use electronic voting since it apparently is not reliable Their conclusions are strongly worded but sound reasonable to me. Quoted from the executive summary: • Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable. • Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines. • Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
- tootie 8y ago
  I find it very hard to believe that paper ballots are actually more reliable. I'd imagine they're just much harder to detect errors so we can't assess how bad they are. Electronic ballots really shouldn't be a very difficult engineering challenge. We're already doing all of our financial transactions electronically and mistakes are relatively rare with an absolutely massive volume of transactions.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    I agree with your sentiment, nevertheless every time I've used an electronic voting machine I've found it very clunky and difficult to operate. It's kind of amazing to me, it feels like the kind of thing that the hacker news crowd could solve in a long weekend. Of course it must be more complicated than that, but even the basic user interface always feels wrong. Just let me push a button that has the candidates name on it or directly above it. Oh well.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      As a member of the "hacker news crowd", I think that paper ballots make a great solution to bad UI for an electronic voting machine. My county uses the paper ballot system described above.
notroot 8y ago
Ask anyone if their vote was counted. The only honest answer is, "I'm not sure." That is concerning. Seems like a good kind of work to spread, thanks for sharing.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  In the last election, I was able to tell that my early-voting paper ballot actually reached the counting machine because of the receipt system. That doesn't cover every failure mode, but it's pretty good compared to nothing. (And do you really think calling any other answer dishonest is going to help the discussion?)
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you, and then when they are counted every number that was read and counted gets posted up on some database or broadcast, or even in paper form to be collected at another polling station, so you know for sure your vote counted? Just spitballing here, because it seems like an easy problem to solve, the US is just notoriously stubborn when it comes to mixing up the election process.
  - cr1895 8y ago
    >What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you Votes must not be attributable to any given person, or else the potential for coercion exists.
    - lamarpye 8y ago
      Or vote buying.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      I read GP as simply verifying that a particular ballot made it into the count, not verifying what the votes on that ballot happened to be. That seems less problematic with respect to buying or coercing votes. I'm not convinced that "lost ballots" are a big problem, but such a system would be a way of checking that.
rblion 8y ago
I wonder what will come of this now. Is there any way to have a 'redo'? If there isn't, how could there ever be justice in the event this was intentional?
kingkawn 8y ago
Surrrrrrprise!
benj111 8y ago
A stylistic point perhaps, but the mention of Georgia makes me think of the country, not the state. That's further reinforced by the missing votes (sorry Georgia (country)), so its only by the time I got to 'African' that I got an inkling that something was wrong, and instantly went back to reread the title again, before noticing the last 2 words. Shouldn't there be a convention of writing Georgia (US) or (state)?

204 points by mcgwiz 8y ago

People have said it before, and it will be said again, but until we have much more accountability and transparency, electronic voting machines are NOT to be trusted and should not be used in any official capacity.

threatofrain 8y ago
Paper ballots disappear too though, don't they? What do you do when elections are expensive and you detect an error, and you can't find who cast the ballot?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  What problem are you trying to solve? It sounds like you want to make perfection the enemy of the good.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Disappearing a lot of paper ballots requires a lot of people working together and a lot of planning, making it more likely someone will talk and giving investigators a better chance of figuring out what went wrong. It also increases the odds of an incriminating paper trail being made of the activities. The fundamental difference between computer systems and paper systems is that the effort required to corrupt a computer system is mostly unrelated to the size of the corruption. Paper systems require a lot more effort for a large effect.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    Why do paper systems require more effort to hack? People just have to be able to predict where close elections are located and botch a few elections. The incentive to do so is everywhere. There have been so many close elections in modern memory. What do you do when you detect anomaly? Have an unpalatably expensive recount? That can be expensive enough to use as a reliable weapon. How do you know if the final count is complete? Do you track down every voter? These things sound expensive enough to simply not happen. Instead one side detects enough anomaly for a court to intervene, and the court considers blunt options or leaving the results as-is. For things like Bush v Gore the court is under enormous pressure to act quickly and perfectly, and they voted along party lines.
    - specialist 8y ago
      The gold standard for election integrity is the Australian ballot (private voting, public counting), where ballots are issued & cast at poll sites, and tabulated on site when the polls close. In my jurisdiction, trust is built on mutual distrust. Every receipt, seal, report, lock had to be handled and signed off by members of opposing parties. Sure, it's possible to corrupt poll site based elections. But you have to corrupt many sites. You'd also have to corrupt upstream and downstream actors as well. Super unlikely to go unnoticed.
- macintux 8y ago
  It is resource-intensive yet viable to track every paper ballot throughout the process. Digital ballots have no such guarantees. The best option to me seems to be scanned paper ballots, which offers the ability to perform analog recounts when there is suspicion of problems with the digital count. (Disclaimer: only a distant observer of this, there may be better options.)
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    For context like 2018 congressional elections, or 2020 elections, what does it mean to track down paper ballots, such as to make sure the final count is complete? At least it sounds like de-anonymizing votes. Or does it mean it's so logistically unpalatable that you can bet on it not happening? Same thing with recount as a remedy to detected anamoly; it's theoretically possible. But is it so unpalatable that a gambler may gamble well on an event?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- specialist 8y ago
  I worked as a poll inspector. Typically, there are ballot accountability reports. eg 100 ballots printed for election day. 50 ballots issued, 49 ballots cast, 1 ballot spoiled, 50 unused ballots. 100 ballots returned to election HQ (central count). Adding or removing ballots from poll site based elections would be noticed. I can't speak to (all) other jurisdictions, so YMMV.
ceejayoz 8y ago
It's also important to note that the most effective forms of voter suppression are the ones that prevent people from voting in the first place. No amount (or lack thereof) of technology matters if you get wrongly purged off the voter rolls.
- burfog 8y ago
  An equivalent to being wrongly purged is when somebody voting the other way is wrongly not purged.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That’s usually not true. Most people are purged because they’re supposedly dead or moved. Those people usually aren’t voting (in that location) anyway, so failing to purge them does little. Even for people who might actually vote there, such as felons or non-citizens, they face severe legal consequences for voting when they’re not allowed to, even if registered, so they usually won’t vote either. Incorrectly purging people is way worse than incorrectly not purging people.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    That is extremely rare in most places, however.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    No, it's not. People have a right to vote. As with criminal prosecutions, the standard should be very high to remove that right from someone - mistakes are a big deal. In some states, the standard for purging has been intentionally made overly strict - "Hyphenated-Name" doesn't match the "Hyphenated Name" the state has on file, so they get purged. It helps when the Secretary of State making the rules is also running for Governor: https://www.politifact.com/georgia/article/2018/oct/19/georgias-exact-match-law-and-its-impact-voters-gov/ https://www.politifact.com/georgia/article/2018/oct/19/georg... > Minority voters are more likely statistically to have names with hyphens or suffixes or other punctuation that can make it more difficult to match their name in databases, experts noted. That makes them more likely to get caught up in the "exact match" law.

temp1928384 8y ago

I can track my mail in ballot (as a resident of SF) on the SF elections website...one reason among many why I prefer vs going in-person.

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

For anyone who didn't follow the Georgia Governor's race last November, it featured Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State running against Stacey Abrams, the Democratic Minority Leader of the GA House of Representatives, who happens to be African-American. The race was decided by a margin of about 55,000 votes in Kemp's favor. Kemp, as Secretary of State, was in charge of Georgia state elections, which presented a conflict of interest for him as he sought higher office. Kemp implemented a voter suppression policy called "exact match," which helped to severely complicate the voting process for about 53,000 Georgians, 80% of whom were people of color. More info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppression-problem-goes-much-deeper-than-brian-kemp/2018/10/20/67dab6c2-cd9b-11e8-a3e6-44daa3d35ede_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppr... Also, voter fraud basically does not exist in the United States as per this article from the Brennan Center: https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud... In fact, the most notable example of election fraud in the United States in recent memory is in NC's 9th Congressional District, where it looks like the Republican in the race cheated his way to victory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_congressional_district_election#Refusal_of_certification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_co... edit: as burlesona rightly points out below, the article to which this comment is attached is about the Lt. Gov.'s race. My comment is about the general lack of integrity in Georgia's elections, and the deeply undemocratic (small-D) results that emerge from this state of affairs.

burlesona 8y ago
Note that this article says the missing votes are specifically in the Lieutenant Governor race, not the general ballot - ie. they’re not saying this affected the governorship. The article says many people reported software glitches where the Lt. Governor ballot item did not display or work correctly, which matches their findings that there were a lot less vost cast than expected for that specific race.
- basilgohar 8y ago
  I greatly appreciate this clarification, not to imply anyone was trying to mislead, but this information helped me better understand what was actually being said, whereas the description by GP may have led me to believe something else (not intentionally). Having said that, the explanation by OP does add significantly to the general case of the integrity of the whole process in Georgia being suspect and need review to ensure the rights of all voters are guaranteed. Otherwise, the process is more obviously a farce than even before and will sow discontent even further.

pizza 8y ago

If I were the one overseeing the election while also running for governor (as Brian Kemp was, and now, successfully attained), I would do everything in my power to make the election be as transparently fair as possible. But as far as this Californian can tell, that was definitely not the case: 1. the voting machines used were known well in advance to be badly vulnerable [0]: He said hackers could infect election computers by first gaining access to a state employee’s computer, possibly by tricking him or her into clicking on a dangerous link in an email. Once the malware is on one machine, it could reach central election systems through internal networks, USB devices or memory cards. J. Alex Halderman prepares to demonstrate Monday at Georgia Tech how easy it is to hack Georgia’s electronic voting machines. In a hypothetical election, Halderman changed a 2-2 vote between George Washington and Benedict Arnold to make Arnold the winner by 3-1. Election computers could also be subverted in person, by someone like a janitor or a temporary worker, Halderman said. Individual voting machines could be tampered with if someone unlocked the latch that protects the memory card port. 2. He reported security researchers (hired by state Democrats) to the FBI for trying to 'hack the system' [1], whereas... In 2015, Kemp’s office inadvertently released the Social Security numbers and other identifying information of millions of Georgia voters. His office blamed a clerical error. [...]His office made headlines again last year after security experts disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed until six months after it was first reported to election authorities. Personal data was again exposed for Georgia voters — 6.7 million at the time — as were passwords used by county officials to access files. <eyeroll/> 3. Georgia implemented a use-it-or-lose-it policy for voting. People found out that because they didn't vote in the past that they had been purged from the register of voters. That's insane to me, but apparently the Supreme Court determined it was constitutional. Georgia also implemented extremely strict name-matching (i.e. make sure that you did not use a hyphen when writing your name one place and a space when writing it in another, because then they won't match). [2] But voting rights advocates fear that “use it or lose it” purges could be used as a voter suppression tactic — along with voter ID requirements, gerrymandering, polling place changes or closures, and registration obstacles — that often help conservative candidates, because infrequent voters tend to be younger, poorer and people of color who are more likely to favor Democrats. For instance, the APM Reports investigation found that such purges in Ohio disproportionately affected urban, Democratic-leaning counties. [0] https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how-hack-elections-georgia-electronic-voting-machines/K4s5F935330BS6fGDm3CVI/ https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how-... [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election-security-charges-in-georgias-governors-race https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election... [2] https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from-voter-rolls-report/ https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from...

burlesona 8y ago

Important context from the executive summary that is missing from the headline: - the missing votes are from the Lt. Governors race only, not the total ballot - many people reported software glitches with that specific ballot item - the study blames faulty programming and insists the state not use electronic voting since it apparently is not reliable Their conclusions are strongly worded but sound reasonable to me. Quoted from the executive summary: • Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable. • Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines. • Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.

tootie 8y ago
I find it very hard to believe that paper ballots are actually more reliable. I'd imagine they're just much harder to detect errors so we can't assess how bad they are. Electronic ballots really shouldn't be a very difficult engineering challenge. We're already doing all of our financial transactions electronically and mistakes are relatively rare with an absolutely massive volume of transactions.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, nevertheless every time I've used an electronic voting machine I've found it very clunky and difficult to operate. It's kind of amazing to me, it feels like the kind of thing that the hacker news crowd could solve in a long weekend. Of course it must be more complicated than that, but even the basic user interface always feels wrong. Just let me push a button that has the candidates name on it or directly above it. Oh well.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    As a member of the "hacker news crowd", I think that paper ballots make a great solution to bad UI for an electronic voting machine. My county uses the paper ballot system described above.

notroot 8y ago

Ask anyone if their vote was counted. The only honest answer is, "I'm not sure." That is concerning. Seems like a good kind of work to spread, thanks for sharing.

greglindahl 8y ago
In the last election, I was able to tell that my early-voting paper ballot actually reached the counting machine because of the receipt system. That doesn't cover every failure mode, but it's pretty good compared to nothing. (And do you really think calling any other answer dishonest is going to help the discussion?)
WilliamEdward 8y ago
What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you, and then when they are counted every number that was read and counted gets posted up on some database or broadcast, or even in paper form to be collected at another polling station, so you know for sure your vote counted? Just spitballing here, because it seems like an easy problem to solve, the US is just notoriously stubborn when it comes to mixing up the election process.
- cr1895 8y ago
  >What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you Votes must not be attributable to any given person, or else the potential for coercion exists.
  - lamarpye 8y ago
    Or vote buying.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    I read GP as simply verifying that a particular ballot made it into the count, not verifying what the votes on that ballot happened to be. That seems less problematic with respect to buying or coercing votes. I'm not convinced that "lost ballots" are a big problem, but such a system would be a way of checking that.

rblion 8y ago

I wonder what will come of this now. Is there any way to have a 'redo'? If there isn't, how could there ever be justice in the event this was intentional?

kingkawn 8y ago

Surrrrrrprise!

benj111 8y ago

A stylistic point perhaps, but the mention of Georgia makes me think of the country, not the state. That's further reinforced by the missing votes (sorry Georgia (country)), so its only by the time I got to 'African' that I got an inkling that something was wrong, and instantly went back to reread the title again, before noticing the last 2 words. Shouldn't there be a convention of writing Georgia (US) or (state)?