A viral video showing a voter in Mississippi attempting to cast a vote in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday had been retweeted more than 10,000 times by Wednesday morning, as voting rights advocates pointed to the video as evidence that a return to paper ballots would make U.S. elections far more secure.
The voter in the video was shown trying to click the box next to retired state Supreme Court Justice Bill Waller Jr.’s name on the touchscreen of an electronic voting machine, only to have an “X” appear next to Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves’s name.
“It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for,” the man said in the video.
Highest recommendation.
“On Monday, the National Election Defense Coalition, Electronic Privacy Information Center, R Street Institute, and Public Citizen called on Congress to hold hearings about election security and the use of electronic voting machines, noting that in addition to the possibility of technical glitches, ‘voting system vendors have operated with little oversight and no regulation for decades.’
”'Given the gravity and urgency of this issue, we write to you to urge the committees to hold a hearing on election system security featuring sworn testimony from officers of the voting system vendors to shed more light on their practices which directly impact the security of the nation,’ wrote the groups.
“Mississippi is one of eight states that are expected to still use voting machines that involve no paper ballots during the 2020 election. New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Kansas will also likely still use the machines, which experts say are vulnerable to hacking and malfunctions.”
Actually, since Georgia’s elections are already being investigated by the House Oversight Committee, with the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, this would be a sensible extension of this current investigation. Georgia too has held paperless, audit-proof elections, which were, of course, also rife with malfunctions as well as rampant voter suppression.
House Oversight Committee investigating 2018 Georgia election
From March 2019: “The committee is requesting a range of materials from the two Republican officials, including ’(all) communications related to any voter roll purges,’ documents ‘related to closing, moving, or consolidating polling sites’ and documents pertaining to the ‘sequestration’ of voting machines.
…"During the election, in which Kemp defeated his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, voters reported experiencing a range of issues related to voting, including long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and issues with voting by provisional and absentee ballots.”
Georgia is no longer listed with the eight states above, because Georgia’s Republicons have recently invested in updated hack-vulnerable and malfunctioning voting machines which, technically, incorporate paper.
These are machine-encrypted print-outs of what purport to be the voter’s choices, but which no voter can verify. These papers are then read and tabulated with additional machines, therefore providing multiple new avenues for Georgia’s Republicons and foreign enemies to tinker with election results.
Republican primary. The Rethuglicans are even stacking their own decks.