Hours after being convicted of tampering with voting machines in Colorado in the name of Donald Trump, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters griped that the outcome was a “sad day for our nation and the world” while continuing to spout false election-related conspiracy theories about “vote-flipping software that is basically in Serbia.”
Peters was found guilty Monday on seven of ten charges after she granted unauthorized individuals access to county voting machines in order to transfer data to Trump allies. Peters faces up to 22 years in prison.
Later in the day, Peters responded to her newfound status as a felon by posting Bible quotes and spreading baseless claims about election fraud.
🤦♂️ here’s a great Tom Scott video explaining why pencil and paper is better: https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs
The biggest thing (which he even acknowledged) is that there are dimensions which favor electronic voting over physical. It’s not as simple as “physical is always better” or “never trust electronic voting” because sometimes making sure it’s even possible for everyone to vote is more important than other factors.
Generally, in an election the size of the us presidential election, Tom Scott at least believes paper is heavily favored.
It’s totally possible for everyone to vote with a paper system. We manage just fine here in Australia, and have massive turn out because it’s mandatory to vote as a citizen, you can vote in advance, via mail, and elections are always on a Saturday.
The US has more people, but that just means you have more people to count votes, this scales just fine.
Not to mention, there are places in the US who have paper ballots.
I’m not sure there’s any situation where electronic voting could be claimed to a suitable way to provide more access to voting. It’s very, very easy to vote here in Australia, much more so than many places in the US.
You just have to actually provide the resources to do it.
I think this is a binary, in the case of elections, electronic is worse in terms of security, and the benefit of not needing to count up votes doesn’t make up for this.
Unless you manage to find a more secure electronic method.