3 ms·
Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when
by tzs 2y ago
Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be found for them.
Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were not allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The issue there was a badly designed ballots and/or badly designed voting machines that let to a large number of spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one they intended to mark.
All the controversy there after the election was how to resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that would not be without controversy.
Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure for dealing with it.
- brandonmenc 2y agoWhat I meant was, the security of electronic voting machines in general. Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.
- chrisco255 2y agoHasn't every other type of computing system been hacked? These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords on the internet and smart people somehow still believe they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on the line and ability to shape policy for the most powerful economy and military on planet earth but for sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on the internet.
- acdha 2y ago> Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." We didn’t, you’re just grossly over-simplifying a couple decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain paper records or printed receipts which which were never validated. That lead to tons of criticism – and better designs. In 2020, nobody said “how dare you question Dominion” because the whole point was that we _don’t_ trust Dominion and use systems which are designed to be verifiable and the results had been independently checked multiple times.
- ytpete 2y agoThe Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, adding important mandates such as a hand-recountable paper trail for every electronic voting machine. Concerns predating that mandate were a very different beast than the unfounded claims one party is making now.