Doublecheck that ballot: Controversial voting machines make their primary debut in South Carolina

[RandySF]

South Carolina’s Democratic primary on Saturday won’t just be a high-stakes contest to decide whether Joe Biden can hold the line against a surging Bernie Sanders. It will also be a huge, highly scrutinized test for a new breed of voting machines intended to offer safeguards against hacking and other digital threats.

But the machines have drawn a lot of doubts about whether they’re up to the task.

The state is among 14 that have scrambled to replace their insecure, paperless voting equipment since the 2016 election, according to a POLITICO survey. Nationwide, 47 states and the District of Columbia rely at least partially on the kinds of devices South Carolina has adopted: touchscreen machines that produce paper ballots for every vote. But Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, which spent $51 million last year to install roughly 13,500 voting machines, is the first statewide presidential election primary being run on these devices.

While the paper-based machines are supposed to make the vote more resistant to digital tampering, they also introduce new uncertainty into an election already marked by widespread warnings that Russia is determined to interfere in yet another U.S. presidential race. Many South Carolina voters and precinct workers will be encountering the new machines for the first time — less than four weeks after the Democrats’ bungled Iowa caucus showed the pitfalls of introducing new technology into a high-stakes election.



https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/28/south-carolina-voting-machines-118046

[bearsfootball516]

1. We recently got those voting machines in Elkhart County Indiana

They work pretty well. Used them when we flipped the mayoral seat red to blue last November.

[2naSalit]

2. I couldn't resist...