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You can also send it to your local election officers, and news stations.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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I have never been able to see what my vote is after putting my ballot into the machine.
That's why the current gold standard is a machine that marks a human-readable paper ballot, and then a drop box, and then a separate machine that reads and counts the ballots. At all times, the physical manifestation of people's votes sit in a guarded box, as piles of physical ballots that can be read and counted by humans, if necessary.
The initial ballot marking machine is good to have because it can prevent overvotes (marking more options than allowed, invalidating the ballot) and can make sure that voters intend their under votes (marking fewer options than the maximum allowed, such as when someone intentionally chooses not to vote on a particular item). The 2000 election taught America what can go wrong with ballots physically marked by the voter, even through a punch card machine. Even since then, there's been issues with what to do with stray marks or incomplete markings on optical scanned ballots (akin to Scantron tests when I was in school).
And once the ballots are marked, it's convenient to have reliable machines count the votes on the ballot. That way vote reporting is quick.
But the paper trail itself is the most important. It has to be a human readable ballot that the voter can visually verify before dropping it into the ballot box.
This is more or less how it works in my state. The voting machines are electronic but before you cast your ballot it physically prints it onto a paper ballot which it displays to you in a window, so you can verify that ballot says the same thing as what you put on the screen. The electronically recorded vote goes who=knows-where, if it goes anywhere at all, but the printed paper ballot goes into a strongbox underneath the machine.
Fun fact: my state got Dominion machines like this in 2019 and then immediately elected Democratic Senators for the first time since 2002, when it had switched from punch-card machines to Diebold paperless ones.
In 2024, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law to get rid of the current machines (which was supposed to have been in effect by now, but has been delayed because it didn't provide funding say what to replace them with).
I'm sure that's all just a series of coincidences.
If you're putting a paper ballot into a machine, the machine is just counting. The paper ballots are retained for hand recounts if necessary. That's different from casting your actual vote on a machine.
right… but you don’t get to see if your vote was changed… it’s supposed to be anonymous voting, nothing ties the ballots to you. none of this makes sense, was this a hallucination from an AI?
It's much harder to get away with vote changing when there's a paper trail. The greater concern is the closed source voting machines, where you have no idea what's going on inside, whether there's an internal paper that matches your receipt, where touchscreens can be miscalibrated and a bunch of people who don't ask for or double check their receipt get fucked over, etc.
Edit: This might still be unclear. Some places have you casting your vote on a computer. Some places have you fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a counting machine. The second case, there's no mystery program handling the voting, it's still on paper.
right but either way, there is no method a voter could use to verify that their vote has not been changed. the only thing we have is evidence that the machine or the stack of ballots have a trusted chain of custody.
so i am confused about this talk of being vigilant that your vote has not changed, when you are forced to trust the system. if there was evidence someone tampered with the paper stack or machine, there is no way to know YOUR ballot was changed. and most likely your vote will have to be thrown out.
There's never been a way for a voter to know if their vote has been changed after they cast it.
I mean, probably.