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US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

vox.com

11–20 of 200 posts

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#11
post #2

Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second:…

Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.

[deleted]

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#12
post #2

Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second:…

Guys, we've had three terrorist attacks this week, and a lot of us are just kind of tired of the partisan sniping.

Can we just kind of give it a rest for a little while? It really is a bad time right now.

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#13
post #2

Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second:…

Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.

Is that your response to the gigantic list of legitimate concerns about our Swiss-cheese election system... it’s all a conspiracy by the media?

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.

Is that your response to the gigantic list of legitimate concerns about our Swiss-cheese election system... it’s all a conspiracy by the media?

[deleted]

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.

Is that your response to the gigantic list of legitimate concerns about our Swiss-cheese election system... it’s all a conspiracy by the media?

If they win they won't complain but if they lose they'll say the election was hacked because of the machines. He's not delegitimising the concerns about the machines, which are evident. He's delegitimising the way journalists are bitching about it.

(I don't follow the American election so I don't know who will win.)

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#18
post #2

Democrats have been complaining about this for decades, but what did they do when they got majorities in 2008? Absolutely nothing. Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them. Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat. Second:…

Vox is just trying to delegitimize the election ahead of a potential loss. They did the same thing for the Supreme Court. Textbook fearmongering.

Or, or, or… get this: You guys have a lot of problems in your election system. (And you really frickin do.)

That Vox is bringing it up now may be a partisan play, or maybe it's not. That doesn't matter, it only should influence your view on Vox itself, not the subject at hand.

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#19

I'm from India and every ejection since 1950s has been called rigged by the Opposition. The party which is in power now, has written a book on EVM tampering and the party which was in power for most of the time have rubbished EvM tampering. Now that roles have reversed, so have their claims. Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not E…

> Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots?

Not everywhere, no: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

Re: US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

#20
My county of over 600k people has a Bureau of Elections staff of five, and none of them are really technical people, they just do basic work on the machines and train the temp staff hired for elections. They rely on a contractor to handle just about every aspect of the technology, including the pollbook system, and that company is a larger operation but still the kind of operation where I've heard the elections staff getting on the phone with them to have them restart a service that had gone sluggish. Some amount of support is provided by the secretary of state, but the SoS elections office is also very small, and even the state's department of IT doesn't have a meaningful security department.

I honestly think that the election system in the United States is simply too decentralized. Counties, even larger ones like mine, struggle to afford to hire a staff or retain contractors that have any kind of serious security expertise - or even expertise in reliable services. The federal elections commission was created to address some of these problems by providing centralized resources to states and counties, but it hasn't gone nearly far enough in my opinion. I have a had time imagining a way to make a serious improvement here without moving just about the entire platform for voting systems under the federal government.

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