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Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.
Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.
That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.
Yes.
And if the incompetence is significant enough, that's precisely where someone would hide the fraud.
The money quote literally says:
Add that to the issue:
And that's precisely the place you'd want to look for fraudsters. But oh so luckily the process was so badly done that we can't really determine what the numbers should be.
If you're trying to swing elections, you WANT there to be enough plausible deniability that the numbers can't be directly challenged. Can't do that if things are well-run and accurate.
But its REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYY convenient that the places where the 'incompetence' is actually so serious all tend to trend the same way on election night.
For 2018, if you add Palm Beach and Broward together (they are adjacent counties, BTW) there's about 1.3 million votes recorded between the two of them. It would be feasible if not likely to hide 10k-30k false votes in there if spread around enough, which as mentioned would be enough to swing the Senate race and several of the state-level executive races.
There's an "easy" solution to to this, just toss out all the votes for the precinct if it happens, maybe allow for a margin of error, like one or two more ballots than voters is okay, but more than that means the precinct doesn't get counted.
If this county's elections operate like mine, everyone working at the precinct is a volunteer from the local area, maybe further if they don't have any volunteers locally. Either way, communities that can't secure their elections shouldn't get their votes counted.
This nearly happened at my precinct in 2024. Guy manning the voting machines wasn't paying attention and nearly let someone cast their ballot and walk out with their voter card, thankfully we caught it before she left the precinct.
I see the risk factor being malicious actors throw the count off to get certain districts disqualified.
It is such an odd situation, you can't really train many 'professional' poll managers for an event that happens like one day every two years.
So we rely on volunteers with minimal training and small motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty.
It sucks that this once again seems like something trivial to do in a 'high trust' society. But as trust degrades suddenly it becomes almost intractable.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a risk, though I'm hoping after a few elections of tossed out results the community would be more inclined to pay attention, and if they're not, well, I personally won't be too put out if their vote doesn't count in national elections anymore.
In theory it should be pretty obvious if someone tries to scan their ballot at the voting machine multiple times, you just need the guy standing next to the machine to be watching. Of course, it means the election results kind of hinges on him paying attention, but you can assign multiple people to that job if it really becomes an issue.
Volunteer quality is going to depend heavily on the precinct. I live in a fairly well-off neighborhood in a pretty wealthy county, and the election work pays less than minimum wage, and the more important jobs (such as being in charge of the entire precinct) basically require you to work the entire 12+ hour day. The only people willing to do it are going to be at least somewhat motivated to have their community's votes counted, there are much better ways to spend your Tuesday otherwise.
In my precinct, the scanners don't give the ballot back to you --- it goes directly into a box that gets retained for recounts and hopefully random sampling. They also scan both sides so it doesn't need to be a specific orientation.
Yes, you're right. The ballets drop down to a box within the machine that we have to lock at the end of the night in my precinct, so there should be no way to scan the same one twice.
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Yep.
Maybe if we don't want centralized control over vote counts, we could still have some central FedGov fund for paying the election expenses of given districts so long as they meet certain standards and can pass an audit.
And maybe those that fail, rather than toss out that election's results, the punishment is that their votes won't count in next cycle.
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