by Dan Shumway, Stevensville
Regarding the raging debate on hand-count ballots: “Experts agree that these machines are insecure because they record votes electronically and could either be manipulated or malfunction without detection. They can’t truly be audited and they leave room for some doubt in the result…[We need] paper ballots 100 percent … This isn’t hard, this isn’t controversial. As scientists, we know exactly what we need,” Schneier said.
Where in the dark corners of the web did I unearth that piece of tin-foil hattery? Breitbart? Newsmax? Infowars? The JBS website?
Nope, that was in an article before the 2020 election, from NPR, that bastion of reactionary-right thinking.
See, it’s not just the MAGA crowd that have voiced distrust in the system. Let us remember that concerns about electronic voting go way back, coming from both sides of the aisle. Moving forward, why shouldn’t we aim for simplicity and trust in the voting system? What exactly makes hand counts and in-person voting worse than what we have now?
From a 2022 AP article:
“French voters in Sunday’s presidential election will use the same system that’s been used for generations: paper ballots that are cast in person and counted by hand. Despite periodic calls for more flexibility or modernization, France doesn’t do mail-in voting, early voting or use voting machines en masse like the United States…Mail-in voting was banned in 1975 amid fears of potential fraud…Machine-voting was allowed as an experiment starting in 2002, but the purchase of new machines has been frozen since 2008 due to security concerns. Only a few dozen towns still use them.”
Even if you’re convinced that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” why wouldn’t you want a system that left less room for distrust and controversy, post election? Why can’t we do the same as France and other hand-count nations? Who knows, with clean elections we may even be able to elect someone outside of the red/blue factions of the Uniparty!