When and why did the US switch to these voting machines that are the subject of ongoing lawsuits and reports of unlawful "updates"?
I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones
Correct. It is. Because to do enough to change the result you need to do it alot, and that’s really hard to get away with.
In Canada we count the ballots with witnesses (called scutineers) to validate.
I’m not sure if they called it a scrutineer but I used to volunteer at elections (US) and they did the same. The counters would sit at a long table with people watching from both sides. If I remember correctly, everyone had to stay until it was done and there was a sign-in/out sheet.
I understand that there’s more people voting for federal elections but it really didn’t take that long. Polling closed at 7 and the results/physical ballots were delivered to city hall by 10
In my case the scrutineers were volunteers from the political parties and didn’t have to stay if they didn’t want to, but I was a deputy returning officer and I couldn’t leave until the count of ballots matched the number of ballots I had given out to people.
All of this talk about election fraud is just power hungry psychopaths inventing reasons they lost. Large scale cheating with paper ballots is much harder than digital systems.
One difference I’ve seen between out elections is we have more polling stations. It’s unusual for people to wait longer than 15 minutes to vote.
We always have results that evening. Polls close at eight pm and results are finalized by midnight.
It might have been party volunteers here too, not sure as I was the “lowest level” of volunteer…
I think you hit the nail on the head with the amount of polling stations. Politicians of a certain party here really like voter suppression.
cheese_greater
John Richard