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from the confusing-cost-with-effectiveness dept.
Picked via Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram, the story of a massive electronic vote miscount, luckily paper ballots were available
Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate's zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.
The worse news:
The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury "one-stop" voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.
The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.
How many trees still need to die until humans learn how to do voting properly?
Note: the original story ran on nytimes, but I respect their choice to not let me read their stories with 'Do not track' activated
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday December 16 2019, @10:21PM
It's important to them that the elections don't appear to be a sham, even if they are shams. That's the difference between being able to dismiss anyone questioning the election results as a conspiracy nutter, and the evidence being so clear that it's impossible to do that and thus the legitimacy of the government is called into question.
That's why the goal of election riggers in non-packed districts is to have the victory for $MY_TEAM to be over the threshhold for triggering hand recounts and other close scrutiny, but no more than about a 5-10% margin of victory so it's believable. The packed districts are effectively conceded to $THEIR_TEAM, which means they can operate as a controlled opposition in legislatures and such even as they're barred from making any kind of actual decisions.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.