Air-gapped means not actively plugged in to the internet. Only a very limited number of authorized people have access to them.
@Whack-a-Mole correctly points out that some years ago, certain machines (Diebold, I think) were vulnerable to being messed with using an unauthorized thumb drive. But I’m confident that no one has access to voting machines where they could just stroll up and insert their own thumb drives anymore. If they could, I’m sure Republicans would have taken full advantage of it.
I know this because, until a couple of years ago, my Mom and Dad, retired, worked in the precincts on election day. Granted, in a small town in VIrginia, but nobody goes out and does this for very little money so they can count fradulent votes. How would they even get them passed through? The whole Idea is crazy, but why can’t Biden and his team expain this in simple terns? Not that it would matter to anyone in a MAGA hat, but it might matter to some reasonably reasonable Republican voters in this small town and others
I think how hard all those people work, every one of them, mostly volunteers and solely because they believe in our country and its rule of law, the importance of the privilege to vote. What Republicans are doing to corrupt the public’s confidence in our processes and institutions offends me to the point of tears.
The Dems basic message is - Trump is, without evidence, saying there is massive voter fraud. Well, that is true. How about this- Trump is saying that thousands of Americans, working for low pay , many of them volunteers ( are both of those true?) because they are patriotic Americans who want to insure fair elections, are commiting fraud, all of this fraud on behalf of Biden. How DARE YOU accuse these people?
It’s why I took the time to explain how the integrity of ballots is ensured through the process, within my own experience.
If we know how virtually impossible these kinds of fraud are, I think we have an obligation to explain it to those with less experience. You’re right that the hard-core MAGAs are out of reach, but for a lot of people, they have simply never thought about how the process is safeguarded.
Last Week Tonight addresses some of the problems with voting machines. Includes hackability, malfunction, lack of a paper trail and the issue of connecting to the internet.
ProTip: Change the quality on a YouTube video (gear icon on the player) to the lowest setting which in this case is 144p. The whole video, at that bitrate, would be about 14MB (which would be about 4 streamed songs).
That may still be too much for you but if you really want to check something out it is one way to do it without eating into your datacaps too badly.
Sounds like a questionable arrangement to me, but at least it was transparent that she had both roles. Ideally, she would be honorable enough to serve in both roles according to what was expected - ie as an impartial officer in one, and as an ardent advocate in the other. If everything is in the open and it is clear that she didn’t mix her two roles, and she wasn’t in violation of any rules or ethical guidelines, I suppose it is okay. It does seem like a lot to ask of somebody, though; personally I might prefer that guidelines be established that prevent such apparent conflicts of interest.
First, I’m not here to defend all voting methods everywhere. @Aspidistra asked a particular question about how easy would it be for Trump to plant 20,000 extra ballots all voting for him, post-election. I explained within my own experience that it would be extremely difficult.
I love John Oliver, but based on a quick read, most of what he talked about is stuff that has happened years and years ago. My understanding is that 46 of 50 states have paper ballots as backups. Many do spot audits. I don’t view Oliver as a dispositive source of reliable data that explodes the whole “myth” of election integrity.
It would be nice if people who question the integrity of our election system could show actual incidents of cheating and not just imply that the system can’t be trusted because people can think of ways to cheat without ever having carried them out.
There are states where cheating is the goal, and as such they won’t update their systems. I’m not speaking to any of that. In instances where cheating is discovered, it is almost invariably Republicans who are the authors of same.
If there was successful hacking in 2020, I guess the hackers really wanted Biden. Oliver presented a lot of innuendo, but so far as I can tell, not a single instance of actual vote-changing. It’s a pretty rough transcript to read, though.
That video was dated November 3 (election day). I am not personally aware of any instances of actual vote machine tampering in this election.
He mentioned one instance of either a programming error or outright tampering, a 2011 election for two seats on the Democratic Executive Committee in Fairfield Township, Cumberland County, NJ. You may remember there was a court case where the local elections administrator admitted that she personally programmed the voting machines (via cartridges) to save the cost of hiring a programmer. The machine she used to prepare those cartridges happened to be wiped clean the day before a court ordered inspection. We know there was some sort of problem because less than 50 people voted, and 30 of those people later signed affidavits that invalidated the results from the DRE machines.
Actually, he does show a computer error that changed the result of a very small election where a total of 43 votes were cast. It could have happened in other, larger, elections. Somebody upthread told me that this type of machine wasn’t used in this election. I don’t know if that’s correct. I agree it’s hard to read the transcript. There’s no punctuation, and it’s not clear who is speaking, so I’ve edited it.
OLIVER : If something goes wrong with one of them you would basically never know because you can’t audit the results and things have gone wrong. In one local New Jersey election a husband and wife were both running for seats on their counties Democratic Committee the D.R.E. machines said that they lost, but they were in the unusual position of actually knowing that that was a mistake
(news clip)
CANDIDATE : I knew 33 of the people that voted for us and we lost 33 to 10 and I knew that that wasn’t the case.
REPORTER: The results had been switched with those of their opponents
CANDIDATE: We started calling people that we thought we knew voted for us because it was just in this district of this Township and we know everybody in this district.
(clip ends)
OLIVER : It’s true. That woman literally went around and got signed affidavits from people saying that they had voted for her which means one of two things: either the machine switched the votes or people will sign anything to avoid a face to face confrontation.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect it never happens. But based on the totality of studies done and efforts made to prevent it, voter fraud is extremely rare. It’s been examined to death.
Can we improve? We can always improve.
I do believe that all the individual systems across 14,000-ish counties actually provide a significant defense to election tampering. I also think it’s important to draw distinctions between election tampering by way of hacking, and election tampering by way of individual voter fraud. In my posts, I was mostly answering about individual voter fraud by submitting false ballots.
No one was more angry than me when McConnell frustrated efforts to disburse additional funds for hardening election systems, however each county felt those funds would best be used. But Republicans are no longer working toward election integrity. They are working actively toward election vulnerability.
