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.

So what makes this better than a pencil mark on paper?

Pretty sure they solved this problem back in the 1960s with a pen that can be used on a screen.

Just like in cars, can we have physical buttons back? Touch screens shouldn't be used for anything important.

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?

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.

or when the paper ballot somehow is either missing or not counted.

See, that's pure coincidence and has nothing to do with manipulation. But if it would flip for the Dems, then it would be 100% Biden's fault. Who is probably not even American, but from Ghana. And has very poor approval ratings.

*This depends entirely on your reality bubble dictated by preferred news source.

I'm sure the talk radio blowhards are reporting exactly this, that the machines are flipping to those wiley and dastardly liberals, but their side will win anyway because everybody loves them and their emperor and everybody thinks they've never done better than they are right now.

Literally. Elections is the one thing I don’t trust with digitalisation.

Sigh, the simpler days of hanging chads...

Same in civilized states in the US. Mark by hand, counted by machine, and recounted by hand if necessary.

The funny part is these voting machines actually just send your selections to a printer, which creates a hard copy with the corresponding bubbles filled in next to your selected names.

Then you feed that printed ballot into a counting machine. And the counting machine is just a fancy scantron reader. The point of the printer is that it creates a hard copy which can be counted by hand for recounts. It also gives the voter a last chance to review their selections (and ask a poll worker to invalidate their vote and let them start over if anything is incorrect) before they actually feed it into the counting machine.

But then how do you compare and correct the result to the desired outcome?

They said don’t be a conspiracy theorist and removed the post.

Have you tried changing the headline from "Tennessee" to "North Korea" and just see if it slips under their radar?

That's a big yikes. WSMV looks like a perfectly reasonable local news source based In Tennessee, and it's not even owned by Sinclair!

This looks like local tech issues and not an attempt to steal an election. But with how openly Republicans have been saying they're going to try something to ratfuck this election, and the amount of bullshit from LW politics mods, suppressing this story is not okay.

Getting banned from the politics community is just a right of passage on Lemmy.

or tankies. they actually dont believe the election was rigged or stolen in the machines.

America, more than ever, varies a lot by state.

I'm from New England. I vote in person because it's fast and easy. In my urban town, everyone lives within a 5-10 minute walk of their polling location. There is never a line and it takes like 2 minutes tops. It's a paper ballot, fill-in-the-bubble style. I had to vote absentee once: I swung through town hall and took care of it in like 15 minutes - same deal except it went in a signed and sealed envelope.

Because that voice and cadence is how you know that I'm telling the truth.............and am REALLY important. BruisedMoose, piefed.social. Back to you la508.

If you've ever had to grade a scantron test, you would know how hard "fill in the little circle completely, and only fill in one circle per question" is for the general population.

1 - so someone could make money off selling them

2 - probably thanks to radio news and a stylistic choice that took hold

The "News Reporter Voice" is actually an Ohio accent. Or rather, the distinct lack of an accent. Add in proper enunciation while projecting calm authority, and BAM! that Ohio non-accent turns into the News Reporter Voice.

That "news reporter" voice has gotten steadily worse over the years. I stopped watching news of any kind a long time ago partially because of how annoying that voice and cadence was. Every time I see any news reporting now it's all I can do not to take to the TV (or whatever) with a baseball bat. I can't take it seriously at all and it's so SO much worse now.

Not all states use voting machines, it's a state by state thing. The news voice I think is something they are trained in. It might be a holdover from the radio days and the "trans-atlantic" accent.

What the fuck is with that weird "news reporter voice" they always do on American news!?

RIGHT?! It's quite bizarre. Maybe it's some kind of standard for maximum clarity or something. It annoys me too, just like "commercial voice."

We do it correctly in Washington State. We get our ballot in the mail, mark it at home, and stick it in a mail box or ballot drop box. It's amazing, and I remember being baffled when I learned voting in person wasn't obsolete.

If someone from the past saw this they'd just assume humanity evolved into clowns. Which isn't even wrong.

Damnit big balls, is their no end to your crimes!

It was an excuse for state legislators to give out no-bid contracts to companies they own stock in. It's that simple. That's the only reason they exist.

Some places, all the places I've been, give you the option. The machines are typically for people with bad vision because it makes everything easier to see. At the end of the day the machine just prints to the bubble sheet anyway and then that sheet is read by another machine.

It worked fine here too until people realized it was another avenue for crooked income. The machines I once worked on stored data to pcmcia media. They worked fine. They didn't need to replace them, but they did anyhow. Because money.