Auditing is the key to verifiability of the machine vote, but can we even trust an electronic system?
Auditing is a key component of the election process and thus needs to be robust, observable, and trustworthy. Unfortunately, our state procedures don’t inspire confidence. As stated in many prior articles, South Carolina citizens aren’t able to gain access to ANY meaningful reports such as cast vote records and security logs. Hand count audits are often done with small samples that aren’t statistically representative of an entire race and aren’t random, nor is the process viewable by observers. This does not align with the spirit of our law.
How can someone observe the process and feel confident about the results when they aren’t allowed to view the ballot content or reports derived from them? The secrecy of the ballot is meant to be during the process of casting a vote. Once cast, the ballot, which has no personally identifiable information, should be able to be viewed in its entirety. The only way to audit our elections is to do a full hand-count of all races. We can do this in an efficient manner using our hand count method as outlined in our gold standard elections whitepaper pages 14-20. https://www.scsafeelections.org/the-gold-standard-for-elections/
Better yet, why are we even using the machines? If we utilize a full handcount to audit to check the accuracy of the machine tabulation than why not just return to hand-counting hand-marked paper ballots?
Here is a truth-telling video that “red pills” the masses from Scott Adams. He makes a great point!
How secure are these machines?
CISA, the Center for Infrastructure and Security Agency, has been hacked. Multiple government agencies have been hacked and recently the Federal Reserve was hacked. If this can happen, we can’t fully trust that the most important currency we have (which is our vote) to an insecure system. From the article,
Josh Jacobson, Director of Professional Services at HackerOne says the threats made by LockBit speak to the fact that “even our most integral governmental entities are not infallible to ransomware attacks.”
“If the Federal Reserve is impacted, that could have global implications. This is not a siloed infrastructure where a finite number of customers are impacted. The potential for residual impact definitely factors in, as well as long-term reputation and trust,” he said.
Wake up America, are your elections clean or are your leaders selected for you? Who owns these system manufacturers? Who is in charge of monitoring them? The people need to take back their elections. We have developed a gold standard method for doing so. Let’s join other Euorpean nations who have returned to one day of voting on paper ballots which are hand-counted.