Election Patchwork Quilts
Views from an election machine tech and judge trainer
The country is a patchwork quilt of many different voting systems and regulations, many regions of which are dominated by one party or another. Neither mainstream Democrats nor Republicans--nor the courts, for that matter--want to delve into an extremely murky and complicated voting trail can of worms once the results are out. They know that, on several levels, some amount cheating and getting away with it has always been a part of the national process.
When I worked as an election machine tech and judge trainer for four years, voting machines would sometimes shut down, or even catch fire, and people in line would understandably get upset and suspicious. Imagine me showing up as your election repairman: “Relax, everyone! We didn’t lose your vote—even though the tally machine is toast!” Which was generally true, because of triple-redundancies in vote storage. But literally having to put out fires in front of anxious crowds never put anyone’s mind at ease with regard to their vote.
When I worked inside a county elections office for 4 years as a judge trainer and elections machine tech, I took my solemn oath seriously and paid attention. I saw how complicated it was to make a determination on mismarked or damaged ballots. Three department officials have to examine each confusing ballot and make determinations on them with notes or video recording. Can’t imagine millions of votes being processed this way, an elections office nightmare with lawsuits across every state. Even electronically it can be a logical nightmare. Election departments have to prepare at least 6 months in advance for a normal presidential election even with known rules. You can’t try to switch to a whole other system with two months until elections, or, among other things, officials would be hand-counting ballots until the next summer.
Things like vote verification and chain-of-custody transparency are relative concepts, and I don’t blame anyone for questioning the rather complex process. The reality of big national elections with a patchwork quilt of longstanding and entrenched political rival regions is they develop their own methods of working loopholes and bending the rules. The beauty of a one- or two-month time limit on election audits and investigations, combined with courts’ refusals to get involved with or even look at cases, is that rival parties just have to keep up appearances long enough to run out the clock and be certified. The public should probably just accept this as a legitimate and unavoidable part of the process.
Central Texas has been an election model for much of the rest of the US. We have used central tally machines that would sit on a table at each election location and be attached to a daisy chain of about 10-20 electronic voting booths. There was usually triple redundancy in terms of storing votes on cards in the counter machine, as well as electronic tally cards installed in each the voting booths, along with real-time transmission to the head office. If numbers on counter machines, booths, and at the head office didn’t match at the end of the night, they’d research and resolve discrepancies. Because of four years of similar direct experience, I tend to trust the security of the process at a local mechanical level. As far as software interference, it’s hard to say.
Have recent national elections been free and fair? I general accept their outcome, and I don’t believe there is usually enough fraud to change the net results. But to call national elections ‘free and fair’ is misleading. Too often one-sided rule changes, veiled censorship, media bias, stacked debates, and certain social pressures and threats skew the results of national elections. Overall, I don’t believe that many national elections of recent times have ever been truly clean-cut, free or fair, and to accomplish that might be a logistically-impossible task.
In national elections, there’s only a criterion of ‘good enough.’ Various forms of subtle and not-so-subtle cheating are simply acknowledged as inseparable from the system itself. When questionable rule changes and irregularities happen well before a national poll, versus during or afterwards, they are generally impossible to pin down in terms of net influence and outcomes after the fact. Thus, once an election is complete, courts are hesitant to even open the books or look at individual cases because of too many unknowns and unknowables.
I’m always curious to hear people’s logic for voting or not voting, and also the thinking behind various voting tactics and strategies. Some who don’t vote say it can bias them generally, or that voting gives the illusion of the consent of the governed. Some who do vote see it as their sacred honor, paid for with the blood of the most brave and valiant men of our country. My take is somewhere in the middle.
My whole life, I’ve tended to vote for independent 3rd parties whenever possible, avoiding partisanship. For me, it’s always been about voting for realistic values and injecting the most important issues into the public debate, rather than winning a horserace. In fact, my candidates have rarely won. But my candidates have invariably been the ones to move the public needle, to nudge the needed dialogue on policies, and to act as kingmakers, monkey wrenches, and spoilers. Whichever will be the most positively disruptive of establishment candidates. I’m proud of the constructive aspects of the uncertainty independents can unleash.
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Votes abroad account for a very small percentage of total votes, and often many of them aren’t actually counted until after an election, unless statistically significant to outcomes. something I learned while working as an election tech and trainer for four years back in Austin. Since I worked in elections for 4 years as a technician and trainer, I learned that mail-ins are almost never counted by election day winner time. They know statistically whether they are worth counting or not, or if they are within margin of error will extend the results timeline to count and recount. They always are counted, but usually after elections because they don't statistically matter. Election officials will generally follow procedures and know whether the pile of mail-ins will or will not be statistically significant to hold up election results or not. Eg if you have 10 million votes counted from early voting and election day already, and 100,000 mail-ins uncounted, but the margin of win is already too large to make the mail-ins matter on average. then just declare winner and spend the next month slowly winding down at the election office and hand-counting the mail-in votes for the record. Our election office always did it that way. I don't know the percentage of early counted mail-in votes, versus early and election day in-person electronic votes, vs. uncounted mail-in votes remaining in any of these swing states, though. Could be some shady stuff on both sides if too many uncounted mail-ins. Just no idea how many there are for covid year. With this covid time how their normal procedures have probably changed. But there's normally no time to count all the mail in votes in a normal year with the average staff office. They probably had to up election staff times 10 just to do mail in counting this year. Our Austin office only had about 10 people counting mail in votes for about 1-2 million person area. It would take about a month after the elections were over to catch up with normal mail ins. Big problem is gray area mail in ballots that have to be personally examined by at least three staff for determination of intent or just invalidated. has to be digitized and on legal record also. I've been in the room for case by case ballot determinations by heads of election departments, very tedious. They typically have to scan the ballot digitally and put it on the big screen to look at markings and damage to paper, etc. to make determinations. And that could be like one ballot in 50.
Crushing their beer can and throwing it at the goddang TV helps some.
I'm happy to hear people waking up to the fake polls and hoaxes. I guess they needed good polls for fundraising and possible contested wins later.
More evidence that Americans are mostly united and have no interest in something like a civil war.
One thing people have to understand is that beautiful words and acting skills are only one genre of leader--image, diplomat. That's only one kind of a dozen. Technocrats are only one or two kinds also, so-called 'experts' that are possibly good or great at a few things they know well but who don't understand much of the greater picture and who should never be leading nations. Those are two issues for many well-meaning, well-educated and rational people. that somehow leadership is supposed to be beautiful words and Hollywood acting, diplomatic, or expert and technocratic. Those are only a few of a dozen genres, and not necessarily the best leaders. Military rule is another genre. Probably several businessman style genres for leadership as well, which are needed at times. Not all the time, but many times.
Cultural backlash happens when groups don’t feel they have been properly listened to. Then the pendulum swings.
Could be, though most of the news people are seeing is as misleading and fake as last week. Votes are still being counted, recounted, and contested for at least another few weeks before anything official.
Too many voting issues in swing states for it to be clean at this point. Hopefully no election do-over in January, because the same issues would probably happen again. Kind of a win for auditing our messy election methods in general.
Not sure that parliamentary systems have been working out better anywhere in the world than the US congressional one (though Brits may be better at public debates). Our electoral and party processes seem to have some awkward and corruptible choke points, namely:
First past the post system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
Superdelegates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate
No one suddenly undermined the major institutions of American society these last few years. They just pulled back the curtain and gave you a good hard glimpse. If you thought the major institutions of society were ever legit and fair, much less stable, now you’ve learned otherwise. And that’s a good thing.
You might want to buckle your seatbelt for these three truths:
1) Rigging national elections is an official part of the system at several steps along the way, and both major parties do it every time,
2) Most national elections in history have been rigged, but there’s no way to know exactly how much,
3) We wouldn’t know what a ‘fair’ national election looked like even if we had one.
Whether rigging was enough to change the outcome or not, this is how it has always worked.
Now go take a cold shower and let that all sink in for a while.
It’s easy to tell everyone else to pipe down and just turn the page when one’s political football team happens to have possession of the ball, though. Truth is usually secondary compared with the pendulum of team sports.
National Guard being called in to help count at some locations. It’s certainly a culture and class war, a media info war, and deep state factions war. To have real physical civil war there would probably need to be a physical line between opponent states again, like California vs. Nevada or something, and all sides would want to participate. Something like 50-100 million gun owners in America and almost no one running out to shoot in the streets because of political reasons.
Whether an election has been compromised is up to claimants to prove in courts of law. This applies equally to most elections, and it’s part of what I mean by the system as a whole decides the ultimate outcome, every time.
If you want a mature nuanced adult answer: Burden of proof is on claimants, though lack of standing doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of evidence—only that a court will not hear a case for their own reasons. Election and appeal systems are both broken, they are never perfectly fair, but the system as a whole decides where the power will go, there is a peaceful transition, and life goes on.
Obviously scale of irregularities and margin of victory/ margin of error are primary concerns. However, non-amateur and coordinated election scams, whether digital or on paper, tend to work best in small batches spread around with multiple methods so as to avoid detection and allow for some plausible deniability when audited. That’s part of why it can be a nightmare for forensics to track down, stringing together ballot drops and tallies to recreate a crime. Big batches of ballot fraud, for example, would tend to only be perpetuated by silly amateurs or by sophisticated fraudsters in desperate last-minute situations. So by its nature, sophisticated election fraud should and will tend to look like a patchwork quilt of ballot and tally irregularities stitched together, otherwise too much risk and not worth it.
I think there’s now enough known to throw out the election. Actually, even though it’s been acceptable before, it may be as simple an argument as officials not being able to examine the black box proprietary Dominion (and other company) source code.
I have quite a bit of trust in the election process generally, and I hope it doesn’t come down to completely throwing out the vote. Backdoor access to proprietary software like the Dominion suite and ElectionGuard may eventually lead to a revote—if not this time, then in the future. The extent of ‘martial law’ would mostly be in securing the voting locations, materials, and process. Wouldn’t necessarily be more credible in the eyes of half the public than the first election, though. Ideally, officials just need to throw out illegal and unverified ballots district by district, no need for nationwide revote.
Obviously scale of irregularities and margin of victory/ margin of error are primary concerns. However, non-amateur and coordinated election scams, whether digital or on paper, tend to work best in small batches spread around with multiple methods so as to avoid detection and allow for some plausible deniability when audited. That’s part of why it can be a nightmare for forensics to track down, stringing together ballot drops and tallies to recreate a crime. Big batches of ballot fraud, for example, would tend to only be perpetuated by silly amateurs or by sophisticated fraudsters in desperate last-minute situations. So by its nature, sophisticated election fraud should and will tend to look like a patchwork quilt of ballot and tally irregularities stitched together, otherwise too much risk and not worth it.