Election Data Handed over to the FBI in Maricopa County Could Be Fatally Flawed(www.propublica.org)
5 pointsby hn_acker6 hours ago2 comments
  • hn_acker6 hours ago
    The original title is:

    > Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say

  • bediger40006 hours ago
    I notice that the story says "ballots" and "ballots destroyed" after two years, as per AZ state law.

    That means that AZ has paper ballots. Further, the ballots are human readable. A hand re-count was conducted.

    This is all good practice, CO, WA and CA (at least) do the same. But it means that "voting machines" is a misnomer at best. The machines so named are tabulators at best. Any accusations of Chinese, or Venezualan or Ukrainian tampering with "voting machines", or talk of "PCAPs" showing mysterious tampering is almost certainly propaganda in service of Trump's authoritarian takeover.

    It's not like the 2000 presidential election. Some states, Florida included, used actual voting machines, where no per-voter-ballot existed, and hand recounts were impossible. It seems to me that since that election was decided by 5 votes, shenanigans could actually have been done.

    • apothegm5 hours ago
      Hand recounts are almost never performed. So tampering with tabulation machines could easily sway an election.

      I’m the last person to believe the Jan 6 conspiracy theory (I’m more inclined to think the accusations of fraud were a pre-emptive strike to discredit anyone challenging the next election). But there is absolutely positively incentive for both domestic and foreign interests to interfere with the machines.

      • bediger40003 hours ago
        The ProPublica article specifically said "hand recount". That was in April of 2021, as I read The Internet.

        There's also risk limiting audits done by most or all vote-by-mail states. The selection of ballots that are used in the audit is via randomly seeded RNG. I've only looked at Colorado:s RLA in detail, but it seems like RLA would be done by hand. I wrote a program to simulate CO's RLA algorithm so I can understand it. It detected "wrong candidate won" with far fewer audited ballots than "correct candidate won".

        I agree about the incentive to tamper. Qanon Tina Peters did so, as did a Republican team led by Sidney "release the kraken" Powell, in Coffee County, GA in 2021.