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Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.

slg 4y ago
> The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run. It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-election-was-closer-than-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...
  - slg 4y ago
    It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel. You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost. And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.
      - slg 4y ago
        >our elections are unacceptably slow That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.
        ChickenNugger 4y ago
        >I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. The solution to vote counting scales right along side the problem. You use more human counters. If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people. I reiterate: There is no good faith reason to use electronic voting machines. It injects an ability to scale up election fraud, and that is all it does.
        slg 4y ago
        >If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people. And if we build a team of 9 women, I bet they can produce a baby in a single month.
- DennisP 4y ago
  But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress: > “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes." https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/ https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/
  - slg 4y ago
    100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.
bandyaboot 4y ago
I don’t believe that widespread voting fraud is a real problem. Is that not a good faith reason to be ok with electronic voting machines?
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Voting fraud is generally a statistically insignificant issue. It's election fraud that is the issue. More here: https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-is-electoral-and-voter-fraud-.html https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-...
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    So say you are right and that you’ve convinced me that I should be against electronic voting machines, my prior opinion on the matter was still formed in good faith, no? edit: on a side note, that website’s description of electoral fraud is pretty sloppy. In their bullet points of what constitutes electoral fraud they include ballot harvesting. Their description of ballot harvesting is not illegal everywhere.

slg 4y ago

> The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.

somenameforme 4y ago
The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run. It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-election-was-closer-than-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...
- slg 4y ago
  It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel. You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost. And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.
    - slg 4y ago
      >our elections are unacceptably slow That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.
      - ChickenNugger 4y ago
        >I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics. The solution to vote counting scales right along side the problem. You use more human counters. If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people. I reiterate: There is no good faith reason to use electronic voting machines. It injects an ability to scale up election fraud, and that is all it does.
        slg 4y ago
        >If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people. And if we build a team of 9 women, I bet they can produce a baby in a single month.
DennisP 4y ago
But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress: > “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes." https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/ https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/
- slg 4y ago
  100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.

bandyaboot 4y ago

I don’t believe that widespread voting fraud is a real problem. Is that not a good faith reason to be ok with electronic voting machines?

ChickenNugger 4y ago
Voting fraud is generally a statistically insignificant issue. It's election fraud that is the issue. More here: https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-is-electoral-and-voter-fraud-.html https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-...
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  So say you are right and that you’ve convinced me that I should be against electronic voting machines, my prior opinion on the matter was still formed in good faith, no? edit: on a side note, that website’s description of electoral fraud is pretty sloppy. In their bullet points of what constitutes electoral fraud they include ballot harvesting. Their description of ballot harvesting is not illegal everywhere.