But I voted for…

Leah McElrath voted early in Texas and tweeted about the experience. At the start of the process she selected Democrat straight party, quite pleased she had voted for Beto O’Rourke for US Senate. But when the final screen came up wanting to confirm who she had voted for it said Ted Cruz for Senate.

When the Texas Civil Rights Project tweeted about such incidents she tweeted back that it happened to her. She provided photos from her phone. Texas Secretary of State heard about it and said it must be user error. Apparently things like this have been happening for years and the Sec. of State office hasn’t addressed it.

McElrath’s twitter thread has caught the attention of the Houston news organizations. Thankfully, they’re making a big deal of it, as they should.

So ask for a paper ballot.

In my city we vote by filling in bubbles beside a name, then the ballot is fed into a machine and it verifies it could read it. The paper ballot is kept. I vote absentee, which means I don’t see the machine verifying my vote.



Brian Varner at Symantec has been buying used voting machines on eBay. He takes them apart to study how they can be hacked. It is part of an effort to strengthen election security. He found: data from the last election had not been wiped and had not been encrypted. His team could get it to allow them to vote multiple times and to switch around candidate names. He worries that since he could buy the machine online so could our adversaries. Buy them, subvert them, and sell them to unsuspecting election officials.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville notes:

Varner further notes that privacy is one concern among many. Like, for instance, the fact that proof of one tampered machine is all it might take to undermine faith in the entire election.

Varner wrote:

That's the greatest fear of election security researchers: not wholesale flipping of millions of votes, which would be easy to detect, but a small, public breach of security that would sow massive distrust throughout the entire election ecosystem. If anyone can prove that the electoral process can be subverted, even in a small way, repairing the public's trust will be far costlier than implementing security measures.

And the scenario many people fear: lots of devices help the GOP get elected and the one that is “found” to be fraudulent is one that helps a Dem get elected.