this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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United States | News & Politics

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[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 day ago (4 children)

The most WTF part is that you all use voting machines. In Canadian federal elections every vote is counted by hand, end of story.

[–] phx@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 hours ago

IMO there's nothing wrong with both.

  • Machine prints out paper ballot, properly inscribed with the selected vote so that there's no "ooh, but there's a smudge here that might mean a vote for X". It could also print out a 3D barcode that contains metadata such as time, place, machine, checksums, etc
  • Human who voted can verify the correct box is selected etc.
  • Vote slip goes into second machine where it's counted (or a box for later counts)
  • Paper vote slips are maintained for recount/validation purposes
[–] minoscopede@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

💯 we should all be very wary of voting machines. If it's not fully open source and cryptographically verifiable, it's not secure.

[–] Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Same in the UK

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I can't speak for the whole US, but in Connecticut we use a Scantron sort of system where you fill in bubbles on paper and feed it into a machine. This leaves us with a paper ballot in addition to the machine's totals. Using machines isn't necessarily a bad thing, it makes the count a lot faster and it's not like human counters couldn't lie. If other states don't have that paper backup though, they should.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

We use the same thing for civic and provincial elections in Canada, but for federal it's strictly hand count only.