Start Of Pa. Election On Hold Due To Ballot Delay
Source: KDKA News
(CNN) — In the latest sign of the chaos overshadowing the 2020 election, none of Pennsylvania’s counties will be able to send out ballots to voters Monday, the first day the critical battleground state allows counties to do so.
Due to a slew of lawsuits and other issues, the commonwealth, which has drawn intense interest from Democrats and Republicans after June’s disastrous primary, has not finalized its ballot less than eight weeks before Election Day.
The state’s Democratic Party remains in court battling to keep the Green Party off the ballot. The pending legal dispute has led to a delay in certification of the November ballot, and as a result, all Pennsylvania county election officials who this year could have started offering absentee or mail-in ballots, as well as in-person early absentee voting, starting September 14 are in a holding pattern.
Pennsylvania, which President Donald Trump won by less than 1 point in 2016, is just one example of a critical swing state that has come under enhanced scrutiny for elections laws that could further confuse and delay results on Election Day.
Read more: https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/09/13/ballot-delay-in-pa-election/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I sure as hell don't. But that is what we have in the city of Philadelphia (since the 2019 General election).
By FRANK BAJAKFebruary 23, 2020
In the rush to replace insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines after Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, state and local officials have scrambled to acquire more trustworthy equipment for this year’s election, when U.S. intelligence agencies fear even worse problems. But instead of choosing simple, hand-marked paper ballots that are most resistant to tampering because paper cannot be hacked, many are opting for pricier technology that computer security experts consider almost as risky as earlier discredited electronic systems.
Called ballot-marking devices, the machines have touchscreens for registering voter choice. Unlike touchscreen-only machines, they print out paper records that are scanned by optical readers. South Carolina voters will use them in Saturday’s primary. The most pricey solution available, they are at least twice as expensive as the hand-marked paper ballot option. They have been vigorously promoted by the three voting equipment vendors that control 88 percent of the U.S. market.
Some of the most popular ballot-marking machines, made by industry leaders Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot decipher. That’s a problem, researchers say: Voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices. Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate.
Even on machines that do not use bar codes, voters may not notice if a hack or programming error mangled their choices. A University of Michigan study determined that only 7 percent of participants in a mock election notified poll workers when the names on their printed receipts did not match the candidates they voted for.
https://apnews.com/ec2374b3f4aa6d8e628b75724cb4caeb
They hand you essentially a blank strip of paper that you feed into the machine and you can't "touch" it to review once you are done (nor was there any top or back lighting on it - at least at my polling location - once it was printed and displayed in the chute) -
I voted by mail for the (moved to) June 2nd primary and HAND MARKED my ballot, mailed it, and tracked it all the way through to confirmation of it being counted. There is no way to "HAND MARK" an ES&S ballot.
I requested paper ballot when I went to vote, and conveniently the printer they used to print the paper ballots wasn't operational 
I sent it back right away and it was registered.
And last year, what happened here in PA, was when counties were directed to get a voting process with a verified paper trail, Philly metro and its surrounding counties, that generally had the same types of "membrane" machines, went their own ways, so some have the fill-in-the-oval and feed the ballot into the scanner yourself at the polling site types and Philly went with those damn ES&S touchscreen machines, where your ballot disappears into the machine - despite the protest from many groups and some lawsuits.
Our election board's concern supposedly was that they were more "handicapped accessible" (they come with a joystick to navigate through the screen pages and select candidates/question responses for those needing one) and supposedly would be a better transition in terms of "look", compared to the previous flat membrane/push button panel voting machines that we had previously -
But the problem is ES&S. 
Then fuck them some more. 
