[kwlug-disc] Vote machines today

[Cedric Puddy]

My 2c; particular regarding the feasibility of someone swapping your ballot for a tampered ballot (eg: so that the counts all still add up, but your vote got replaced by a fraudulent vote for some other party)…

I think that it is far from trivial for that sort of switching to occur;
The number of ballots processed needs to match the expected number from voter checkins, so any discrepancy in the count would trigger a manual recount; I think folks are generally agreed that the number of expected votes is non-trivial to tamper with, and beyond the scope of OP’s pondering.
Have just voted, and reviewed the process with my wife, who has been trained and worked elections, there are a bunch of protections around getting that vote fed into the tabulator.
The person feeding the vote into the tabulator doesn’t have access to blank ballots, and there is nowhere around that person that swapped/prepped fraudulent ballots could be stashed; the guy handling my ballot was wearing slacks and t-shirt, so not exactly going to be hiding stacks of 8.5x11” ballots in his clothes.
You watch them place your vote in the tabulator, and wait to see if it is rejected.
In theory, if your Tabulator Operators where Penn & Teller, perhaps they might be able to do some clever slight of hand to hide ballots in their cloths and swap them around while you watch — but that’s only two guys … there are thousands of people across the province who are tabulator operators, and very very few of them are world class magicians, and even if they were, the number that would do such a thing is even smaller.
You are not the only person watching for anything hinky around the whole process of you handling your ballot — everybody is in teams, and it’d be pretty hard to, even on the scale of a single poll, hide a pattern of deceptive behaviour, never mind on a mass number of polls.
The comments about the redundant CF cards + Paper audit log print out have been covered, likewise the processes around statistical anomalies and disputed results.

For those reasons, I’m personally comfortable that substituting ballots on the way into the tabulator would be non-trivial.

  All the Best,
  -Cedric

> On Jun 2, 2022, at 5:02 PM, Gordon Dey <gordon.dey at happydeys.ca> wrote:
> 
> The 'Tabulator' machines are programmed to differentiate between spoiled and empty ballots (i.e. failed) as well, and produce those stats at the end.
> 
> The Tabulator and the ballot collection box that it is on are sealed, and the seals checked every morning and evening of the advanced poll plus the day of the election. The number of ballots issued at each polling station must equal the total the ballots reported counted (including empty), spoiled, and rejected. The tabulator operator, if skilful, will have no problem proving this all adds up.
> 
> The Tabulator itself is not connected to anything other than mains power. No radio or network, just a pair of sealed CF devices. The software is tested before and after the election. The daily and final total paper tape and unsealed count CF are stored. It's all reasonably tamper-evident and resistant to 'fudging'.
> 
> It really can make a multi hour counting job into a multi minute job, which is appreciated at the end of a long day.
> 
> [Disclosure: former trained Tabulator operator. Had no problems. Would do again.]
> Gord.
> 
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