Some of you have been on this site for over a decade.

[Kelvin Mace]

363. I don't know if you missed this part

Note: Since it is easy for me to misconvey the proper tone intended when having these types of discussions, please know that what I am writing are my observation and experiences, and are not meant to imply a confrontational, critical, or accusatory context, nor should such be inferred.

Throughout our discussions with county officials Serio and Lance, it quickly became apparent that the problems in Arkansas --- at least in Monroe --- are likely to get much worse before they get better, as the county has plans to buck the trend in the rest of the country, which is moving away from 100% unverifiable e-voting systems, back to paper ballots.

This story is 4 years old, what has happened since? Also, the story notes that the TS systems have paper printers attached to create an audit trail, but that they have jammed without anyone noticing.

File that under "You can lead a horse to water..."

The adding of paper audit trails to TS machines was a direct result of the holy Hell we raised starting 12 years ago. In my state (NC) they are required by law, and there is a set audit procedure in place for post election verification which randomly picks precincts and checks the digital count against the paper count. The law also states, in essence, that should discrepancies appear, paper beats electron.

Safeguards are no damned good unless they are used. You mention your own district, but give me no information on it so I could look it over and see if anything looked hinky. The situation you describe can arise, and generally does arise, from various legal/semi-legal and blatantly illegal voter suppression tactics, rather than voting machine tampering.

As I have stated on many occasions here, on the TV machine, to reporters, and to groups in a number of states:

1) Technically, you could rig an election by tinkering with a voting machine. Realistically, folks are not going to go to the trouble due to how many people have to be involved in the conspiracy. And you DO have to have a LOT of corrupt people to pull that off. Also, if you are caught (and tampering with a computer and not leaving evidence is harder than most people think), what you have done is a prima facia felony. The other means of "rigging" elections (vote caging, purging voter roles, poll "watchers", parking police cruisers in front of polling places in minority areas, intimidating billboards, misleading robocalls/emails about poll times and dates, etc) are either legal, or VERY difficult to prosecute. So as a straight forward, low risk "high return on investment" tactic, tampering with voting machines is unlikely because of the danger and cost.

2) All the voting machine problems I have reviewed over the years have four possible explanation:

a) Software error: These things run on Windows and are subject to the same bugs all other software is subject to.

b) Operator error: Election officials/volunteers are not computer tech/gurus/scientists, and as such they can get tripped up on tasks as simple as exporting results to a spreadsheet and uploading them to a web site.

c) Machine failure: Computers break. When you consider that these are very specialized computers than only get used about once a year, but have to be brought out of storage, transported to precincts, set up, calibrated, used, then broken down and packed up for the return storage, failure of a certain percentage of machines is expected.

d) A dark cabal of partisan individuals who have conspired to rig the election.

The simplest explanation for a phenomena is probably the correct one, so I go with the first three if they fit the facts, over the fourth unless someone can come up with some compelling evidence for the fourth (And again, tampering without leaving evidence is pretty hard).

3) ALL of the election officials I have met over the years (in the hundreds), even the ones who disagreed with me and hated my guts, struck me as honest and conscientious about their work. These people get a LOT of grief for what they do (administer the machinery of democracy at its most basic level). They HATE controversy and like their elections to go smoothly without opening the door and finding a battalion of reporters on their doorstep (or worse, legions of lawyers bearing papers with Latin). The major problem I had with them was they were sold a bill of goods by the voting machine companies ("Since there are no pesky paper ballots to count, your election will run quickly and be error-free&quot . It takes a lot of effort to disabuse them of the sales hype. And since they don't have computer security professionals on staff (they should, but good luck getting that job budgeted for), they trust the sales people as "experts" since they have been working with these people for years.

Are there bent election officials out there? Certainly, and their insider access give them all sorts of ways to tamper with the vote, but practically all leave some evidence a proper investigation will catch, thus there's that whole felony thing again. So, if they are going to tamper with the results, they are more likely to "lose" some actual ballots, since "misplacing" ballots is not a crime.

4) The idea that most elections can be hand counted is wrong. People point to Canada as "hand counting Mecca", but it is an apples/oranges comparison. Their election rules are mandated at the national level and their ballots are pretty simple, only a handful of races. American elections, by contrast, are conducted according to 3000+ sets of laws, one for each county in the country. Also, ballots can be lengthy and complicated, which means logistically it would take a VERY long time to count the ballots with the resources currently available to your average county. Also, realistically, the more complicated the ballot, the more likely a human will miscount. The more a ballot is handled, the more likely it is that the ballot will be damaged or lost.

5) The best of all worlds, least of all evils, system currently available, is a paper ballots, tallied by an optical scanner. The optical scanners would tested for accuracy by election officials (not voting machine company employees/contractors), and a statistically significant random number of precincts are hand-counted after the election to insure accuracy.

In conclusion, there are still places that need to ditch "paperless" systems, but they have been growing fewer every year. People, especially voters, are more aware of the problems of TS systems and more likely to point out any problems they encounter. Many states have enacted anti-BBV laws to insure paper audit trails for TS machines. This world is a VERY different world than 2002 when TS machines were set to quietly become the national standard and few people saw the consequences of such a standard.

I would call that a win.