The Virginia State Board of Elections moved Friday to do away with touchscreen voting machines in the state by November’s election, a move aimed at boosting security.
The board decided to phase out the machines this year after the Virginia Department of Elections recommended that the touchscreen voting machines be decertified. The recommendation came after security experts breached numerous types of voting machines with ease at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The move comes amid heightened concerns over foreign interference in future elections, in light of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used cyberattacks and disinformation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Yes, yes, yes!
This is EXACTLY what needs to happen all over this country in order to regain our voting integrity.
We have known since 2000, that these voting machines can be hacked and it is WAY past time that we shit can them and go back to paper ballots.
The Russians will be back, and dammit we need to be ready.
Every state should eliminate electronic voting. I'm all for the paper ballot. It takes more time to count them but, in the end, since there is the ultimate paper trail, it is a much more accurate way of voting.
ReplyDeleteBeaglemom
Yes indeed, clean elections. And one step further, instead of paper from Beautiful Redwood Trees lets use Eco friendly hemp paper as the first elections used. Keep history alive.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea.
DeletePaper ballot is the only one we should use. So what if it takes longer to count the votes! With paper we can always do a valid re-count if needed. And, no one in a dark room at a computer can mess with what the people want.
ReplyDeleteI'm a member of the county electoral board in a rural Virginia county. Actually, this process started after the 2013 general election when several municipalities experienced "weird malfunctions" on a few touchscreen machines.
ReplyDeleteBack in the early days of electronic voting machines, manufacturers thought it would be a god idea to build in wireless capability that would enable voting machines to report results directly to a central location without going through the election-night process of manual tabulation. Problem is, few if any municipalities instituted such a process, leaving such voting machines with unused wireless capability.
After the 2013 elections, inspectors found the problem: Polling places were in libraries, most of which have public wifi -- the voting machines were trying to talk to the library wifi!!!
Virginia's State Board of Elections immediately decertified touchscreen machines from one manufacturer. Last week's action built on that decision and banned all touchscreen voting machines.
NOW -- let's differentiate between touchscreen machines that TABULATE VOTES, and touchscreen machines that produce a printed ballot, but that do not count the votes. My county purchased a new suite of machines two years ago. We still have touchscreen machines because they feature full handicapped accessibility. However, these machines do nothing but print a paper ballot with the voter's choices marked -- the voter then inspects the printed ballot and deposits it into a digital scanner where the votes are counted. Because everyone votes with a paper ballot, we have paper ballots for backup in case of questions.
The digital scanners (in some localities, older optical scanners) are old, reliable, proven technology that reads paper ballots -- and you always have the paper as backup.
I remember a malfunction in the 2012 election in my area. The electronic machine would change the vote and they claimed not to have paper ballots. az.
DeleteI live in Oregon and we have been voting by mail for years. To my knowledge, there has never been even a hint of fraud.
ReplyDeleteOT-"He notes how 2016’s shadow includes ongoing fights between Bernie and the DNC “over such matters as control of valuable donor lists and demands for a more progressive agenda.”"“There is good evidence that defections by Sanders’ Democratic primary voters on Nov. 8 played a decisive role in Trump’s victory,”
ReplyDeleteFROM DAY 1-On April 28, 2015...,Misogyni$'t' Commie!
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/complaining-about-hillarys-campaign-book-is-a-huge-waste-of-the-progressive-movements-time/
""RedState’s Jim Jimitis compared the failure to prosecute Lerner to the failure to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. “Just like the Trump campaign’s anti-Hillary chant ‘Lock Her Up!’ turned out to be all talk and no action, so has Trump’s bluster about the IRS targeting scandal,”
Deletehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/08/today_in_conservative_media_lock_lois_lerner_up.html
"Clinton was asked about her basket of deplorables comment, and she answered, “I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable MANner. I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior as we saw on the Access Hollywood tape was deplorable, and there were a large number of people who didn’t care. It did not matter to them, and he turned out to be a very effective reality TV star.”It is important that Clinton brought up the Access Hollywood tape because America can’t be allowed to normalize and forget about the fact that the man who is occupying the Oval Office bragged about $EXually A$$aulting women."For the majority of Americans, he will be the bigoted, sexually assaulting, reality television star who only won the presidency with help from Putin and the Russians."
Delete{add the Bern it all down gang.}
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/09/10/hillary-clinton-crushes-trumps-fragile-ego-cutting-statement.html
Sad. It was normalized and racist acts too.
DeleteDang we had computers, but also paper docs with results and you could see inline too. The same db voter staff could see. You can always verify your vote results.
ReplyDeleteThis supposed Russian interference did not win Trump the popular vote so why does anyone care?
ReplyDelete