A history of electronic voting and GOP funny business from 2000 up to now

[LymphocyteLover]

Good thread here from Jennifer Cohn:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1297286962819153920.html

My gut feeling is they rigged the election for Trump but just not enough, which is why he keeps claiming there was fraud.

[targetpractice]

1. Thanks for this, Lymphocytelover!!

The "election fraud" in Florida 2000 was simple, but I never heard this reason discussed much.

The FL state government (under Jeb Bush, Republican legilature, and Katherine Harris) approved an installed highly accurate optically scanned ballot machines in Republican counties/precincts. The did not approve upgraded for Democratic precints, and they were stuck with error-prone punch card ballots... with machines that had been emptied or cleaned of punched chads.

The error rates for optical scanned ballots were less than 1%, whereas punch cards were 10%.... Organized, systemic voter suppression.

[58Sunliner]

2. Wow. 10%.

[targetpractice]

7. That's what I remember, back when I joined DU...

The main issue punch card "undervotes" is the boxes that were supposed to collect the chads had probably never been emptied... They were so chock full of chads at the time... That many voters could not fully punch through the card.

At least that's what I remember reading at the time.

UPON EDIT... The error rate was not for switch votes, or incorrect votes... I believe 10% was the undervote error... Those that registered no vote by the counting machines.

[58Sunliner]

3. All those mail in ballots. I think 2016 may have been rigged.

[LizBeth]

6. +1

[czarjak]

4. "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying"? I've been informed.

[Dem2]

5. That interview expresses many unprovable assertions

Just because something could have possibly, technically been possible, doesn't mean that it did.

Evidence.

[LymphocyteLover]

8. I understand but the problem is how so many of these machines give unverifiable results

the one piece of evidence is the pre-election polls being so different from the voting results, except in states where they did all mail ballots.

[LymphocyteLover]

9. NYTimes piece on 2004 election with John Kerry

"How did our election system get so vulnerable, and why haven’t officials tried harder to fix it? The answer, ultimately, comes down to politics and money: The voting machines are made by well-connected private companies that wield immense control over their proprietary software, often fighting vigorously in court to prevent anyone from examining it when things go awry. In Ohio in 2004, for example, where John Kerry lost the presidential race following numerous election irregularities, Kerry’s team was denied access to the voting-machine software. “We were told by the court that you were not able to get that algorithm to check it, because it was proprietary information,” Kerry recalled in a recent interview on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show.” He was understandably rueful, arguing how wrong it was that elections are held under “the purview of privately owned machines, where the public doesn’t have the right to know whether the algorithm has been checked or whether they’re hackable or not. And we now know they are hackable.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/election-security-crisis-midterms.html
Good piece overall on this topic

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. GOP screams, "Voter fraud!" to distract from the election fraud they are committing

News and Dems say there is no widespread voter fraud, which is then conflated with no election fraud, and it's the same old shit every election.

[LymphocyteLover]

11. Yes, exactly. And it's really disturbing how little we have heard about the Trump and deJoy

sabotaging the post office and their effery with mail-in ballots.

[yardwork]

12. I think that security has improved, making it more difficult to rig elections.

Read Dominion's statement on Sidney Powell's crazy accusations: https://www.dominionvoting.com/dominion-statement-on-sidney-powell-charges/

[LymphocyteLover]

13. thanks for that-- a good smackdown of her ridiculousness

If they do have paper trails, then that's great and really an improvement. The real problem is EV machines that have no paper trail.

[LymphocyteLover]

14. Dominion seems better than ES&S

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb4ezy/top-voting-machine-vendor-admits-it-installed-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-states