E-Votes Flip D to R in Texas, R to D in Illinois: More Trouble With Touch-Screens (2014 Edition)

[cascadiance]

43. But we also must make sure that paper ballots aren't altered by third party before being entered...

... in to the system, or the audit will fail as well. That is why there needs to be scrutiny of who is handling ballots up until the time they are recorded and also ensure that process is observed before they are secured safely someplace away from anyone else too. Voters can watch how their ballots are being stored at voting booths, etc., whereas absentee ballots and vote by mail ballots are totally outside what the voter themselves can observe once they put their ballot in the mail or drop it off at a library, etc. We need people of all stripes watching the process (and perhaps cameras as well) to ensure that there isn't doctoring of the ballots. Now in these cases where they do try to alter ballots, the potential for individuals to get caught and punished are a lot higher, so hopefully we can put in place enough checks to have a heavy disincentive for them doing so.

Also, when altering ballots like this physically, the potential damage to larger amounts of vote counts is so much less that it is less likely to affect election outcomes than someone behind the scenes hacking the results after they've been tabulated, or hacking the machines that record the votes as well. Those people can damage the system with a lot less scrutiny than those doctoring paper ballots as those stupid women from Clackamas were caught doing. But they might have succeeded, without the proper camera monitoring that wasn't well put in place there, or without observers who noticed something was wrong then.