Corporate Electile Dysfunction Epidemic Strikes US

😂 See Microsoft Election Insecurity

At 10 mins 27 secs, Jonathan Simon is quoted as saying that a manual count is secure. That's just not true. See this post, which I wrote five years ago.

One needs to take into the account the whole process though. In a general election in a country the size of the United States of America, the organization necessary to carry out a paper ballot is enormous. It may be that a few individuals can be poll-watchers, and can directly verify the counts of paper votes, and know to some extent that the actual votes those counts represent exist, and are all the votes that were made. But then only a few people are actual witnesses. What these people do is to produce a certificate of some sort. They sign a paper saying "I observed the electoral process at polling station #nnn on this date dd/mm/yy, and I hereby declare it to have been conducted in a free and fair manner."  Then all these papers have to be collected up and at some point authenticated. And of course all the direct evidence has to be collected too: the data that says "I hereby certify that Box mmm, sealed at polling station nnn, on date dd/mm/yy hh:mm, contains the following: x for canditate X, y for candidate Y, z spoiled." And this data has to be authenticated and collected. And the process is a distributed one. So at some point the data has to be collated and summarized. And that process too has to be verified. At various levels people are using computers, electronic communications systems etc.

What I am trying to say is that a paper ballot is almost an electronic one. The only part that's different is the actual act of voting. But that is not infallible either. The authenticity of the electoral roll has to be checked to make sure there aren't false entries that can be 'filled in' by someone who knows which are the false numbers on the register, and the individual id's of voters have to be checked, etc, etc. Thus the integrity of the people who check these things must checked, etc, etc.

And the question I have for anyone that says a paper ballot can be made verifiably free and fair is "Who makes the judgement that the whole combined process is free and fair, and on what basis do they make that judgement? (i.e. in the words of Martin-Lof, what is it that they must actually know in order to have the right to say this?)"

See Thirty Years of Compromised Information Security  and this recent post which will give you some idea of what could have been going on over he past thirty years or so in election fraud. So a paper ballot is vulnerable to these sorts of issue:

And how are you going to prevent those kinds of abuses without using computers? So, thanks, Jonathan whoever-the-fuck-you-are, for your authoritative advice. We need secure communications, you fucking dip-shit educationally retarded assholes!