MarleyandtheWhalers t1_itr43pk wrote on October 25, 2022 at 6:10 PM

Two questions: first, what reasonable questions about election security can or should be raised for elections with fully paper ballots? What about those without?

Second, are there any major real-world known cases of voting machine interference that have affected a democratic outcome, in the US or elsewhere?

Thank you for offering to answer our questions.

TheOfficialACM OP t1_itrt8ea wrote on October 25, 2022 at 8:50 PM

Risk-limiting audits (the topic of this thread) are all about how to improve security with paper ballots. So a reasonable question for someplace that has paper ballots is "when are you going to do RLAs?"

Without paper ballots, we're back in the world of paperless electronic voting systems, which have been shown to have a variety of security vulnerabilities (discussed elsewhere in this Reddit). So a reasonable question for someplace that has paperless electronic voting systems is "when are you going to retire these machines and what's the plan to replace them?"

I'm not aware of any systematic voting machine election interference, at least in any U.S. election in anything resembling the modern era. If you go back far enough in time, you get plenty of well-documented messy elections. The story of "Landslide" Lyndon Johnson's victory in the 1948 Texas Senate Race is pretty amazing.