this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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It's not a great theory, and quite frankly I think getting stuck on a college project is silly when you can just make a new program with better resources but I think it goes:
1: Issue blue pens to swingable democratic regions (or whatever).
2: Have the machines set to generate a fake ballot image when it detects blue ink on the voter signature. Doesn't need to be every ballot, just enough to swing the region.
3: Print the generated ballot instead of what they voted for. I'm not sure how all machines work but my area physically prints a paper copy, do any machines just keep entirely digital records?
4: Voter is apparently unaware their choices were changed.
This presumably wouldn't work in my area any more as it prints a scannable code and your entries, but it would have worked in 2016 when it just printed the code.
I don't buy this specific chain of events, but it is an excellent demonstration of why voting machines are just a stupid fucking idea. Even if they were the most secure, unhackably hardcoded systems in existence there would always be doubts.
On the other hand, it's not like paper ballots are tamper proof themselves.