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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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TN voter here. The poll workers are aware and on point. I was given a warning delivered in a very neutral tone. "Because there are so many options and the options are narrow some people have been noticing when they try to select an option it chooses the one above. Make sure the tip of your finger touches the candidate you are choosing. Double check the candidate you want is selected as a grayed box. Triple check the candidate you chose is showing on the review page. Quadruple check the candidate you chose is printed on the slip before feeding it into the counting machine. Come to us if the printed slip does not show the candidate you chose and we'll spoil it and reset your vote." Poll workers are heros.
That honestly sounds more like fucked up screen calibration than anything. If the machines are old as fuck, they likely still need that. People forget how shitty touchscreen tech used to be.
It's still enough to have the wrong height / wrong angle for looking at the screen and you easily get the wrong option.
I would argue that maybe the design should have more space between options.
When it comes to republican election fuckery there are no coincidences.
There are other ways to mess with the counts that aren't going to be visible to the person as they make selections. Like having it show whatever they're selecting properly, then just printing different selections at the end. Not everyone is going to verify the printed copy shows what they selected, and already confirmed on the machine once.
Making it jump around on screen isn't discreet at all, and it's not the easiest way to try and interfere. Poorly calibrated touchscreens, and a user interface with inadequate spacing between options are much more likely reasons.
We're used to using devices that companies spend a lot of time designing the User Experience on. Voting machines are a very niche industry, with virtually no consumer backlash for a shitty experience because the voter has no direct control, and the government isn't going to be using that interface to handle things like counts at the end.
They are doing that too. They don't care about discreetness.
I think the MAGAs are at the point where they don’t care if they are discrete because they know there will be no consequences for their corruption. News outlets will forget about it after a day, if they even report it. Democrats will send a strongly worded letter and forget about it. If any part of the justice system that still has integrity (increasingly rare) gets involved, Trump will just pardon them. The People might hold a protest or two, but they won’t do anything that actually threatens power.
This happened a few elections ago. Always favored Republicans for some reason.
This has been happening ever since I can remember and I'm 40. Paper ballots need to be mandatory in all states and the vote counting software should be open source.
It's fucking insane that we allow private companies to hide their code from us.
That depends on if it's happening to both parties or only happening to one party for some reason...
Wouldn't be hard to game.
Just use a scheme where it selects the closest candidate to the "touch", then offset the calibration such that it thinks a touch on #2 is #1. Then tapping on #1 will still select #1 because it's the closest, while tapping #2 will select #1 because the tap thinks it's closest to it.
So if the Republican candidate is always #1, then I'd bet it's deliberate. Actually, all it needs is for the Democratic candidate to be #2 to split the Democratic vote, though then it runs the risk of splitting the Republican vote as well (assuming the "miscalibration" is linear, if it's non-linear, then it could get "more correct" the further along the screen it goes).
If it was unintentional, you'd expect to see no specific party benefiting from the errors overall. Ie, in some locations it favours red, some blue, and in others one of the other candidates. Though even with this, if the distribution ends up such that it favours blue in blue strongholds and red in battleground areas, then that's still fishy.
Seems like a good reason to maybe have random ordering? Then it would need to be reading the content to be able to properly change things instead of something a little less obvious like screen calibration.
Absolutely, then you could do statistical analysis on the positions to see if any position is biased (for or against) and detect the problem and recalibrate the screen and no one candidate would gain that much of an advantage (well, candidates that weren't going to get many votes would benefit, but not to the point where they'd be able to steal an election).
But that assumes they are being run in good faith.
Easier to press the old resistive screen with a coin than with a finger. lol
Europoor here: I thought you guys had actually digitalized the process. This just sounds like ticking a box on a piece of paper with a pen with extra steps.
Note that every state can differ.
In my case, it is a pen and paper, scanned by machine.
I don't know if any state has gone full digital. That would preclude a manual recount, which I know is commonly a right of a candidate to request in a close result.
the conservative states, use voter mahcines much more pervasively than the non-conservative areas. paper ballots have always been more secure.
That's exactly what it is.
But you see this way the state has to buy billions of dollars of machines.
and who owns these machines, gop backe dcompanies.
I'm glad my state doesn't go in for this bullshit. Paper ballot filled out by hand.
Well you can't rig it as easily if you fill in the bubble with a pen. Use your brain for a sec, duh. You europeans just don't GET us. /s
So what makes this better than a pencil mark on paper?
Nothing. Americans getting ripped off by some company selling bullshit at the expense of their democratic legitimacy.
You can count the votes faster... but who cares about that when you can just take longer?
Likewise, electronic voting just introduces the doubt of legitimacy, even if voting is totally safe and legit.
Note that the paper ballots generally don't take longer to count, they are generally digitally scanned in the same way the printouts from the touchscreen machines are.
It might speed up voting as a tap is a little faster than filling a bubble, but then again a wide tip marker would fix that, but then you might spoil more ballots when people aren't sure if they mismarked it.
I guess but we still have pencils and teams of humans counting. I agree its the safest and easiest to audit.
Swapping a pen or marker could spoil a box if some funky ink is introduced.
Here in Sweden votes usually take about a week to finish counting, including re-checks and such. It's not so bad.
What is bad is that we're 40 days in and the government still hasn't been established. Useless pieces of shit.
Ah. We had one of those in Australia in my memory. All came down to a weird iconoclastic independent called Rod who finally announced his choice in a press conference where he famously took twenty minutes to actually announce his choice. Milked it right to the end.
Wasn't 40 days though. Only a bit over two weeks.
Pencil marks are prone to issues of stray marks, invalid choices (like choosing two candidates for a single office where you can only choose one), incomplete marks like where there's only a dot (or ✖️ or ✔️) when you're instructed to actually fill in the whole bubble. Many of these types of marking rules can invalidate an improperly marked ballot. And pencil marking is also subject to regular old mistakes, like when someone bubbles in the candidate other than their intended candidate, by following the row/table alignment incorrectly.
The ballot marking machine is helpful for making sure that the ballot generated isn't invalid, and prevents certain categories of mistakes.
Well, for starters...
Nobody mentioned punch card ballots.
Punch card ballots are supposed to be much better than pen/pencil and paper and that ended in disaster.
What the fuck do punch card ballots have to do with pen and paper?
Just like in cars, can we have physical buttons back? Touch screens shouldn't be used for anything important.
And certainly not in cars.
Pretty sure they solved this problem back in the 1960s with a pen that can be used on a screen.
The general public would have forgotten how to use this highly advanced equipment by now, sometime after the first few iPhones. :( :(
Such things are FoR TeChNiCaL pEoPLe now.
(Sorta satirical, mostly genuinely sad.)
I mean, they solved it by showing you which option you selected before you moved to the next screen.
I tried looking to see if you can request a paper ballot in Tennessee but keep getting results for absentee ballots. Are you not allowed to request a paper one?
The machine prints a paper ballot, which you then feed into a counting machine. The voting machine itself doesn’t actually store any of your votes after you have sent your selections to the printer. This allows them to preserve a hard copy for recounts, and also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections before they feed it into the counting machine.
do you know why they don't just print the ballot and put a big circle for somebody to mark with a sharpie?
seems to work great up here in Canada... very straightforward experience
I mean, any teacher who has ever used a scantron for their tests will know that “fill only one bubble per entry” is difficult for a surprising percentage of the population. Plus, if someone makes a mistake on a paper ballot with a sharpie, they need a whole new ballot.
We have paper ballots in Oregon and it isnt a problem. Unlike a scantron, the ballot is 5x the size with 5x fewer options so it isn't crammed full of little tiny bubbles to pencil in. They also print on the ballot instructions for what to do if you select the wrong bubble (cross out the bubble with an X and fill in the correct one), so that isn't a problem either.
It seems people in this thread are just giving cover to shitty practices and election fraud under the guise of "I can invent a problem in my mind therefore it's an actual problem and why these deceptive practices must exist."
Thanks for reminding me to read the voters guide on the Max later today!
hanging chads... shudder
Yeah, but they're dealing with kids.
You would hope that an adult who is competent enough to be voting should be able to accomplish such a simple task.
Ah, I see you've never worked in front end customer service, food service, or retail
right, but scantrons are small and ballots are big. it's not that difficult to spoil a ballot and get a new one
idk, my experience as a voter and my understanding of how it goes through discussion with my parents and their friends who have worked the polls many times makes it seem like the process is pretty okay, overall
I'll have to remember to bring the topic back up in the upcoming elections
What kind of idiot (or compromised) developer wouldn't put the selection boxes as far away as reasonably possible from each other on the screen?
What fuck we fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a machine. Have never had to vote on a digital machine. In Oklahoma just so you know. Wonder how many people vote went to wrong person.