Victim of Communism

  • 60 Posts
  • 1.46K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I beg you please stop misrepresenting the argument.

    “Paper ballots are more secure!”

    “Obviously, the textbook case that exposes all the problems with manually managing and tallying physical ballots is beside the point”

    Okay, sure.

    If you refuse to address this point

    Electronically input printed ballots are the best method of tabulating an election result we have formulated to date.

    There is absolutely no benefit to using pencils on paper. None. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss.

    Your fetish for pencils doesn’t change with the election season. It just becomes blindingly apparent when election is fumbled badly enough to necessitate a deep dive into what went wrong.



  • There is something inherantly more secure about physical ballots.

    There isn’t. They can be easily misread and miscounted, they can be misfiled, hidden, lost, and destroyed. They are a bitch to transport securely. They can vary in format and interpretation. They’re comically easy to spoil.

    An average person can fully comprehend how a paper voting system is kept secure.

    No they can’t.

    Again, jump back to Bush v Gore. Or go all the way back to Nixon v Kennedy or Tammeny Hall New York. Hell, consider the elections in Iraq and Vietnam and Korea after the various US occupations, and the comically one-sided election results. Or elections in the old Soviet Bloc, which Americans routinely dismissed as fraudulent. Or the most recent elections in Latin America that remain openly disputed.

    Very easy to point to historical moments where the paper ballot systems were distrusted. That’s pretty much the whole history of their use.


  • But it’s much less plausible when you have more secure voting systems.

    No lay voter has any idea of what constituents “secure” in a material sense.

    All you have are people insisting “my system is safe, your system is not”. And this thread is a perfect illustration.

    Hand marked paper ballots are notoriously prone to failure. Nothing about them is materially more secure than a printed ballot. And yet…

    This is easily solved by never having any portion of the vote counting and transport happen alone.

    It isn’t easily solved, as the number of venues and volume of votes leave ample opportunities for shenanigans (or, at least, alleged shenanigans).

    The Ohio Recount in 2004 is a classic example.



  • The Arab parties’ 18 seats is the biggest game changer. The Netanyahu block will obviously never partner with them

    It’s more that the Arab Parties would be deeply reluctant to partner with them. But that hardly matters when Gadi Eisenkot is IDF to his bones, and fully in favor of ethnic cleansing of Arabs.

    The biggest problem you’ve got is Itamar Ben-Gvir picking up and changing sides, on the condition he gets to keep massacring school children