"Paper trails protected the integrity of the votes in closely watched states, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, but many counties still lack that protection. States mostly rejected the riskiest voting technology — internet balloting — but a few embraced it. And a pandemic-ravaged nation managed to vote safely and reliably, but election offices are still woefully short of money and staff.
Perhaps most of all, this year also exposed the United States’ vulnerability to election threats from within, as President Donald Trump and other leading Republicans promoted discredited conspiracy theories to try to nullify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory." [snip]
"Without a paper record of every vote, it is impossible to reliably recount or audit a jurisdiction’s results, because there is no way to rule out the possibility that malfunctioning or compromised voting machines miscounted the electronic vote records. [snip]
No federal regulations govern the security of voting machines or other systems used to conduct elections, forcing individual states to try to regulate a powerful, highly concentrated industry that has drawn criticism from researchers and lawmakers alike." (our emphasis)
Funding for election security has been blocked by the Rethuglican Senate, another priority to focus on, in addition to giving the Postal Service the resources it needs to perform effectively in handling increasingly popular absentee ballots.
While members of the Dear Leader's cult will never accept an outcome that doesn't elect one of their own, for the sane majority, it's important to have a tighter system, for the purpose of inevitable court challenges and basic trust in the process.
(photo: The Fraudster-in-Chief peeks at "Melanie's" ballot to make sure she's following orders. Reuters)
2 comments:
I'm lucky. I live in Oregon where we have had mail-in voting for 22 years (the first state in the nation to do so). It works just fine, and there is a paper trail that lends itself to statistical verification if not actual recounts. No more going to the polls, where in today's world you can catch a nasty virus...
I get why the GOP is all about limiting voting rights, it's a sure fired way to elect the people that reflect their limited views, and it is indeed antidemocratic. As a young man I admired a number of Republicans especially Tom McCall the Oregon governor from 1967 to 1975. He is the reason Oregon became a progressive state, and institutionalized public beach access. He believed in environmentalism particularly in clean air, healthy forest, and pristine water...
Not sure what happened to the GOP, it went from science loving to science denying. To supporting democracy to abandoning it, from believing in reality to believing in Q-anon, from believing in truth to believing in the firehose of bullsh*t we're subjected to nearly every day...
Much like the biblical Moses and the Jewish refugees from Egypt, the Gop would be well served by spending 40 years in the wilderness, then maybe we can talk...
Jimmy T -- Well said. After every election that they lose, they supposedly do a "post mortem" which results in them becoming ever more extreme and delusional. Forty years may be the minimum.
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