Thread by @PeteB2

Here’s the thing about Ballot Marking Devices and voters not checking their ballot summaries:

People have demonstrated for many years they are willing to blindly trust paperless electronic touchscreens to count their votes correctly. /1

The share of voters who didn’t place trust these paperless machines to record votes correctly has always been small. This is unfortunate of course, but not very surprising. /2

The very act of using the equipment lends it credibility: Election officials surely wouldn’t use it if it couldn’t count votes properly. Moreover, the idea that vote results could be changed by a few keystrokes is too terrible to consider possible. /3

It’s hard to imagine all the reasons why people don’t have more suspicion about the validity of elections where there is no ability to do a physical audit of voter-marked ballots. But that’s the reality - many don’t have concerns /4

So building a voting system that allows hackable machines which could also be prone to error to mark ballots & then relying on every single voter to catch possible vote flips on their ballot after the fact is insane /5

Not to mention that voters would be unable to prove any vote manipulation they experience to poll workers, and poll workers wouldn’t be in a position to know the right action to take since they’d only have the say so of voters who it happened to. Much better w/o machines..