Fox having to pay a substantial damages settlement to Dominion is a just outcome; their amplification of lies about malicious backdoors and rigged elections was contemptible and dangerous.

But we shouldn't conclude from this that US voting systems are perfectly or even adequately protected against attack. While great progress has been made, there's still a great deal of work left to do to make our elections truly secure and robust.

The best thing that Dominion could do with their infusion of cash from Fox - for both their reputation and for the good of democracy - would be to invest it into developing more robust, auditable election technology, such as optical scan systems with features to facilitate Risk-Limiting Audits.

@mattblaze hand marked scantron is the only realistic solution. Allows quick results and a verifiable paper ballot for recounts.

Any *private* non-public source code counting our votes is absolutely undemocratic.

@pixelpusher220 @mattblaze
how does that differ from the Dominion ICX (ImageCast Evolution) already in use which literally tabulates paper ballots electronically for near-term tabulation while the verifiable paper ballot is retained in the event an audit or recount?

@apenguininspace @mattblaze that's the problem. We don't know.

A paper trail is better than nothing but there's just precious little benefit to having a software program do the voting part.

If they open source their code so it's reviewable, that would be ok...but still overkill for what's needed, simple scan n read.

Next up is the blatant security failure of these *private* machines. Sure they've been improved, but why incorporate the risk if you don't have to?

https://m.slashdot.org/story/298229

Slashdot

@pixelpusher220 @apenguininspace @mattblaze Unless that software voting machine only produces a human readable scannable ballot and does not directly submit the vote, which as far as I know all but 7 states in the US do. 6 of those are red states, the 7th is NJ. You don't need a source code audit when you can just test it.