Stunning Republican Probe Finds 4,000 Missing Votes From Trump-Biden Election — Votes TAKEN FROM Biden
Stunning Republican Probe Finds 4,000 Missing Votes From Trump-Biden Election — Votes TAKEN FROM Biden
In another blow to Trump's "STOLLEN ELECTION" narrative, Republicans have found 4,000 votes that were miscounted — in Trump's favor and to Biden's detriment.
The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors. The reporting errors did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.
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The discrepancies did not affect the outcome of any of the elections, but they did add to a growing list of defeats for Trump’s election lies.
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I mean, that's pretty bad in itself. You'd think for a national election someone could find programmers able to make formats match and catch errors properly.
What were you guys voting on anyway? MySpace bands?
The UK has humans count pieces of paper with X next to candidates names.
It's pretty cheap and it works really well.
And it's really hard to mess with the thousands of votes needed to swing an election because that's a lot of paper.
Republicans were against that in 2000, I imagine they still are
Physical votes need to be paired with digital votes so the two can corroborate each other. The paper tickets should be gps tagged, signed for at all times, and remotely monitored, their location backed up in the cloud.
Ensure the numbers are correct with a clear path to find discrepancies.
It's too easy for a dozen hundred crates to end up in the bottom of a river. Every step needs to guarded against humans doing humanity.
Distribution and logistics are an obvious area AI could/should take over. We already relinquish scrutiny to the "algorithm".
But that might actually be beneficial to humanity, so don't hold your breath.
Look up risk limiting audits, there's ways to do it which doesn't just mean "throw random tech at it"
It should be paper and humans. I know the comic is meant to be funny, but it is accurate.
Am software engineer, can confirm
It's not that easy... There's a bunch of proprietary systems, each adapted to dozens of specific regulations.
Id say every 200 lines or so of code you make a mistake. Sometimes you hit the wrong key, sometimes you have a brain fart, sometimes there's some complex interplay that leads to occasional issues.
A good programmer catches like 90% of them. Giving time for self-testing catches another few percent. A rock solid design with high automated test coverage might cut mistakes by a factor of 10. Add in great qa (a low paid role with low status and easily cut for profit) and you might get 90% of whatever is left
There's no perfect code, and if you have to interface with another company jealously guarding their own implementation? They might give you a sample file and a short format definition. Is it correct? Can everyone read the spec and come away with the same understanding? Is there room for a bad actor to put their finger on the scales?
It's just beyond human capability to write perfect code, even in the perfect environment. And the ideal solution is redundancy - ideally you'd have like 5 teams running very different software in parallel for each vote and count, and you'd debug any situation where they don't all agree and recount.
But that would be ungodly expensive and politically impossible... There's room to do better, but there's no money in it
There's a bunch of proprietary systems
interface with another company jealously guarding their own implementation
See, this is dumb. Not you, I mean. Program to format text documents and automate office paperwork, sure. I prefer TeX but YMMV. But how do you commercialise voting? Oh, "it's America". I guess.
There was a good Tom Scott that pointed out the problem of electronic voting is not just the reliability and trustworthiness of the systems, but the transparency for ordinary people to know it's trustworthy.
You can't achieve that perfectly with computers - not even with paper - but it's important. Obviously to me, that would mean having the system open source, with closed (for extra security) extra measures for auditing. I understand them not doing that, but the government not wanting the voting software and systems to be fully open to government? That just blows the mind ...though I kind of expected it.
As to redundancy and lack of bugs, there are some impressive programs out there by people who've got what it takes to make things very precise from formal definitions and so on (cf some of the Functional Programming community, amongst others, and certain un-bloated well-defined security things). Does the American government not have access to such people? Did they spend all their money on TV shows so they've none left for good programmers? And tallying election votes is not really the most elaborate of tasks, more one that needs formally defining very carefully. No ML professors left over from the dark ages who can write a formal spec as a PhD? How about all those NSA lot who are supposed to be able to make spyware so clever it slips between the cracks in Apple phones? I suppose that's a field more of try lots of things and hope some work, but still.
Sorry, rant over ;-)
The source being open doesn't mean you can tamper with it. It means you can see it (in this case).
Did you mean "can't"?
Open source lets the general public* audit it to know exactly what it's doing. So much of the world revolves around layers of secrecy and convenience-trust. Elections should not be so!
*Or members thereof
I meant "can". If the repo is read only you can't change the code.
Okay. I think I missed your meaning a bit then.
Agreed for sure. Open source doesn't (by its openness) mean people can tamper with it.