[EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

>> But murderers get away with murder, police are being bought
>> off by criminals, government employees steal office supplies.  No one knows
>> exactly how much any of things happen.  We try to limit them (balancing the
>> degree of the problem and the cost of addressing it), and we go on with our
>> lives.
> 
> OH. So you see it as no big problem to pretend to live in a democracy
> (where you can pretend to yourself that most election outcomes are
> accurate) and continuing to let elections be the only major industry
> where insiders have complete freedom to tamper because 49 US states
> never subjected their election results to any independent checks,
> except the wholly unscientific ones in NM.
> 
> Even when Utah used to use paper punch card ballots, one person did
> all the programming to count all the punch cards for the entire state
> of Utah, and no one ever checked after the election to make sure that
> any of the machine counts were accurate.
> 
> You sure must believe in the 100% infallibility and honesty of this
> one person, and all the other persons who have trivially easy access
> to rig elections.
> 
> Apparently  none of the plethora of evidence that election rigging has
> been occurring ubiquitously in the US is of any interest or concern to
> you.

I'm not Rob, so excuse the interruption, but some questions and ideas here:

Won't the people, as a last stop, keep fraud from being too blatant? You 
don't need scientific methods to know that something's up if a state was 
80-20 Democratic one cycle and then suddenly becomes 80-20 Republican 
(or vice versa) the next. Fraudsters could swing 45-55 results, but it 
doesn't completely demolish democracy, since the >60% (or whatever 
margin) results would presumably be left alone.

Fraud corrupts results, but it seems to me that fortunately we have some 
room to implement improvements that get us closer to verifiability 
without having the fraud that exists plunge the society directly into 
dictatorship.

New voting methods and improved fraud detection could also strengthen 
the prospects of each other. If you have an election method that 
supports multiple parties (since the dominant parties can't rig all the 
elections everywhere), then instead of only one other party, you have 
n-1 parties actively interested in keeping an eye on what rigging 
attempts do occur, and a lesser chance of entrenched forces colluding to 
"ignore each other's attempts", since collusion among multiple entities 
become much harder as the number of entities grow.