Georgia congressional election challenged

[leftieNanner]

The Coalition for Good Governance is suing to have the recent Ossoff-Handel election overturned because of the electronic voting machines!

I would add the link, but I am electronically challenged. Washington Post.

We need 100% paper ballots nationwide.

[Warpy]

1. I think all elections in which those easily hacked machines are used

will need to be challenged. It's the only way we can get rid of them and have any hope of restoring integrity to the system.

I don't expect this result to be overturned. However, lawsuit after lawsuit over these machines might eventually get them junked because it will be too expensive to keep them.

[leftieNanner]

2. I hope so too.

We have 100% vote by mail in Oregon and some of the best turnout in the country.

[blue-wave]

9. Mail-in voting might be the way to go nationwide

With only paper ballots, too often in the not too distant past, stuffing ballot boxes was very common. The electronic machines are easily hacked. Central mail-in ballot locations with poll watchers, from all ideologies and candidates, sounds like a very fair way to count the votes.

[Hoyt]

13. The election in question had mail-in ballots, month of early voting and a judge even gave us an

extra month to register voters before the June special election. Yet, GOPers still got out the vote and won in a red district. The votes weren't tampered with and there have been no creditable reports of people being turned away from the voting stations. We lost, and will continue to do so if we think it's voting irregularities beating us.

[Lee-Lee]

15. Mail in voting is more susceptible to fraud than electronic

Keep in mind that a secret ballot is something that must be maintained, that means that you can't have any identifying serial numbers on ballots linked to a voter without being willing to have elections officials at some point see how you voted if they wanted.

How easy would it be to counterfeit ballots and mail them in? What is to prevent that? If ballots are serial numbered then see my above, they are not really a secret ballot?

What if my ballot is stolen from my mailbox, filled out and mailed in by someone else? How is that prevented? It is easy to know when ballots are mailed and would be in boxes, I could go over voter rolls and find people who don't vote most of the time since what elections you cast ballots in are public record and swipe ballots from the people who wouldn't care if they got one or not and cast them myself.

If someone swipes my ballot and a request a replacement and both are submitted do both get counted? If not, how to they know what one is the real one- can you know without having identifiable information on the ballot or envelope that could be used by someone to see how I voted? What is to stop me from casting mine then saying it was lost and casting another if you can't tell?

What is to stop a right wing postal employee from trashing all the ballots he sees that come from minority neighborhoods? Just takes one GOPer with the post office to sort out all the ballots from mailboxes he picks up in black neighborhoods to disenfranchise hundreds of voters in a few minutes,

Who is guarding mailboxes where they are cast? An even moderately skilled their can pick a lock on a mailbox and steal contents faster and easier than anyone could phycally hack an electronic machine, and at less risk. You have no real security of a ballot sitting in a mailbox on the street.

All those are issues with absentee ballots now, sure, but absentee ballots are such a tiny portion of the vote it is hard to use those techniques and have an impact. When you start pushing 100% of the vote through the postal system that makes those techniques a lot easier to pull off and have a huge impact.

The idea that somehow paper ballots or mail in elections are secure or even more secure than any other means is fantasy. In many ways they are less secure.

[leftieNanner]

17. Oregon has it worked out

In order for your ballot to be counted, you are required to sign the back of the envelope. That envelope is then scanned to verify that this signature matches the one on your voter registration form. If it doesn't match, then the envelope is held aside. The ballot itself is in a secrecy envelope within. So all of the issues with someone stealing your ballot go away. There is an online resource that allows you to check that your ballot has been counted and if it has been set aside, you have an opportunity to clear up the problem.

The outer envelopes are discarded so that there is no way to see how you voted. Secrecy is maintained. Republicans hate it because it increases voter turnout.

[Lee-Lee]

19. What's to stop some USPS employee from discarding ballots from minority neighborhoods?

What is to stop theft of ballots from mailboxes to disenfranchise voters by trying to keep them from voting or make it more difficult by making them seek replacing ballots?

Lots of weaknesses in the system. To claim it is somehow more secure than anything else is naive.

[leftieNanner]

18. The USPS

Is secure! We also have secure drop boxes available for people who don't have a stamp. These are available the two weeks before election day. They are manned and emptied frequently. I had doubts when we first moved here too, but it works!

[Lee-Lee]

20. The USPS is many things- secure is not one of them

The USPS has a loss rate for mail that while low if you think about mail is way to high to be tolerable for lost votes.

There is no secure chain of custody for regular USPS mail. When paper ballots are used in an election they require two people have eyes on them at all times to assure there is no tampering and no ballot box stuffing or other irregularities. The USPS has none of that.

You see stories every year of postal employees busted for trashing mail or storing it instead do delivering. And that is just the ones that get caught and get publicity. If is that easy for it to happen out of laziness then it's clear that the system is not secure and that someone with the intent of messing with the election could just as easily do that to ballots.

For USPS to be considered secure for transfer or evidence for something like a criminal investigation you have to use Express or Priority mail with tracking and require a signature on delivery. That's not going to happen with every ballot in the country.

[MichMan]

3. I disagree with that strategy

I disagree that every single one should be challenged

1) Makes it look like Democrats can't accept the results and are sore losers. Now if we also challenge the ones that we win, we might score some points for that

2) Too many constant challenges means that none of them will be taken seriously

Reminds me of a well known college here. According to many of their die hard fans, their football team never actually loses a game because they got outplayed. Every loss is blamed on bad calls by the referees and favoritism for the other side by the officials. Every single time....

[Warpy]

4. Beats the hell out of the strategy so far

The Democratic Party has challenged none of the elections using these easily hacked machines, not even when the hacking was so clumsily done as to be obvious. They still haven't.

Please reread the article and realize this is being done by a watchdog group, not the DNC. This has to be done. The longer these machines are in service and being hacked, the less trustworthy the results are, destroying faith in the whole democratic system.

My own state acted quickly after the clumsy 2004 election results made it obvious the machines had been hacked and were not trustworthy. In 2005, we got 100% paper ballots.

[MichMan]

6. Never said none should ever be challenged

Disagreeing that every single one should be challenged every single time for the reasons stated

[mythology]

11. Except there is no evidence that any votes have ever been hacked

Just because you call something so clumsily done as to be obvious doesn't actually mean you're right.

[quakerboy]

7. Thats very optomistic

Somehow I doubt that Republicans mind spending as many taxpayer dollars as it takes to further their election subversion attempts, however.

[Valhallakey]

10. Agreed - contest them all even if you win

Shows a nice consistent view. That should be adopted by the Democratic Party today.

[RandomAccess]

5. All you have to do is

copy the URL from your browser's address bar, then paste it into your post. Nothin' fancy at all. The buttons that make it fancy don't seem to be working, so copy and paste is the rule of the day.

[iluvtennis]

8. LInks to articles

http://www.kwqc.com/content/news/Lawsuit-seeks-to-void-Georgia-congressional-election-results-432520853.html

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/story/35810623/lawsuit-seeks-to-void-georgia-congressional-election-results

[Hoyt]

12. In this case, waste of time and makes us look like whining poor losers. GOPers got out vote in red

district, we did not despite a judge ordering an extra month to register voters after the first round of the special election, mail-in ballots and a month worth of early voting. But, hey, let's complain about the vote tabulation.

[Lee-Lee]

14. Are they citing specific claims of how it was hacked or proof votes were changed

Or is this another "OMG we lost is must be that evil technology because it's impossible for us to lose unless it is hacked, we are so perfect we must have won the real count, I don't trust this gee-wiz wizbang computations machinery because I don't understand how technology works so whenever the result is one I don't like its bad, I am going to make Democrats look like fools by screaming about voting machine fraud or vote hacking without being able to actually articulate an intelligent theory demonstrating how it was done or proof it was done but just scream that it happened" type deal?

[Amishman]

16. Unfortunately it looks like a theory with no evidence, with a side of sour grapes

5% swing would have to be the most brilliant criminal endeavor ever in order to not have glaring statistical anomalies.