The number 1 most important property of voting by far is that the results are believable.
Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines.
I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public.
When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated.
The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.
> I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify.
How could one person ever do that though?
Have you considered becoming a poll worker or doing election observations or getting hired by a precinct as temp?
Just this week I spent 2 hours watching election workers unpack ballots, verify signatures, etc.
There are opportunities to see with your own eyes but it requires learning how the process should works and showing up to see if things are being done correctly.
Our entire election system as it exists today has integrity as an assumption, not as a guarantee.
Voting machines require integrity as an assumption, they offer no guarantee. They actively damage trust, and yet a trade off was made in exchange for cheaper, less complex (to run, not understand) elections?
This means our election officials, with the presumption of integrity, optimized for getting the most people voting (in blue states), not for trust. Choosing to use voting machines when there is significant dissent about their use alone is enough to damage the integrity of an election.
It doesn't matter how many people vote if you can't trust the votes. It doesn't matter if some people trust the votes if the loser of an election does not trust the votes.
Democracy means the loser sees they are the minority and submits to someone else's authority because they recognize that they are the minority. If the loser does not trust the integrity of the system, then democracy has failed.
I watched an election in Taiwan (paper ballot system) happen, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can think about and reason how it operates or how it might be attacked.
I really don't think our election would be that hard to attack an election in a state that would shield the attackers from consequences. We have not seen any consequences for a flagrant attempt to attack our elections in Georgia.
I am a fairly well educated product of the American public education system. I am almost certainly in the top 15% of Americans as far as education goes, and I do not have a firm understanding of how elections operate. I think 70% is a lowball estimate of Americans that probably couldn't tell you a very good story about how elections actually work and why we should believe they are legitimate. That is a real problem.
"It can't happen here" is American exceptionalism, and I've got some very bad news. It can happen here. It is happening here.
The fact that there has been no evidence of any significant voter fraud, machine malfunction etc is a conservative problem.
I only see Left and Liberal believing in the data. And pushing for people to vote. Instead the right say "if we win it's good, if not we need to investigate". So I don't buy your line personally.
What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections? Serious question I'm curious. Because this is a fairly recent phenomenon that has exploded exponentially thanks to conservatives. Most famously Trump.
I cannot verify or convince myself of the believability of an election. Therefore, it is reasonable for conservatives to not be able to convince themselves of the believability of an election. Therefore, while I believe that the conservative effort to deny elections is done in bad faith, there is a good faith argument to be made that there is a very serious problem with our elections.
The moral hazard is that because conservatives are bad faith, I can't imagine a good faith effort to improve election integrity.
> What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections?
What has me concerned is that our elections are complex beyond a layman's ability to communicate a meaningful story about how elections are conducted and why they are to be trusted. A layman is left with only one option: trust.
"Trust us" is not a good foundation to build a democracy upon. Especially if "us" is someone who has declared themselves an enemy, if not in words, definitely in action.
If that's not enough, the highest office in our land, literally called an election official on tape and asked for votes, and there has been no consequences. A system incapable of producing consequences for bad actors cannot maintain integrity.
The end result of that saga was a person making the ethical choice, but what prevented the secretary of state from finding those votes? I don't know what would have prevented it or what safeguards there were. Even if he "found" those votes, and even if it were caught, there would have been chaos, and that chaos would have been used as a ladder. History is always written by the winners as they say, so history will always report elections as legitimate, regardless of how chaos was used as a tool to shift outcomes.
Do you think Americans decided the outcome of the 2000 election, or do you think the judicial branch did?
What do you think happened to Raffensperger after he chose to do the right thing and deny trump his request to corrupt the election? The state voted to remove him (the secretary of state position itself) from the state election board chair.
As one last final note, there has been considerable effort to attack elections, the whole DeJoy thing alone should be worrying. "I trust our elections" liberals are going to look awfully silly when the conservative assault on election integrity starts showing fruit. Gerrymandering and limited polling locations alone are an assault on election integrity without being a "direct" attack on integrity. If that can be done consequence free, what makes you feel so secure?
Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines.
I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public.
When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated.
The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.