Is the voting system rigged ?

Things like this are why we went back to paper ballots in Florida after the 2008 election.

Well kind of. . But not necessarily at the ballot booth. We are manipulated by innuendo and fear. The FBI weighing in at the last minute with crap that they knew was bull to persuade the undecided to either not vote, or vote for a 3rd party or just stay at home. Also the use of projection numbers. This convinces those who don’t want to vote to stay at home because they think their choice has it in the bag.
Today, hatred and fear won.

Before the election, there was speculation that the Russians had hacked the voting machines.

After a quick google I’d guess it’s not so much rigged as knocked together from low quality components to maximise profit. Having said that hacking some of the voting machines used in the US apparently isn’t that hard.

This needs to stay on paper. I say that as a software engineer. The glitch described by OP, if it affected others, could have affected thousands of votes. Not to mention any and all hacking possibilities.

Yes. See this.

Our voting machines are closed source, run by private-for-profit companies. Even in states where you have paper ballots that are counted by machines, there is a serious potential for throwing the election.

Well Trump said the system was rigged (and he did not say in whose favor). Perhaps he was not so much warning us as informing us.

Still use paper ballots here.

Rigged, probably, given the for-profit companies involved (even making and operating some digital machines), and all the corporate money available. I’ve seen what seems like over a hundred stories about different types of vote & election rigging this year.

I echo @Mariah – as a software engineer, I’d say it’s patently ridiculous to try to trust electronic voting machines, especially those built and/or operated by corporations, unless you had massive third-party auditing, for which paper ballots would work just as well and likely cost less and be more trustworthy.

If you were for Xerxes Trump before the election, it was rigged.

If you were for Jezebel that she did not win, the election was rigged.

It is what it is, some will be happy and some won’t, if your candidate lost, it is because the nation did not feel they were fit enough to lead; end of story.

Trump said plainly that the election was rigged. I feel silly now for doubting him.

^ Maybe it was rigged but it backfired a nd did not keep him from office.

@Hypocrisy_Central ^Maybe it was rigged but it backfired a nd did not keep him from office.

Maybe Trump was telling us. Maybe the system was rigged…in Trump’s favor!

@Hypocrisy_Central if you take the time to look at @gorillapaws link you will see that election rigging is not just a party vs party occurrence but also occurs within the individual parties, both parties. Begs the question as to who is pulling the strings.

An interesting note is that they also found what they feel is evidence of possible manipulation for more than one candidate which means, in my opinion, that you would/could have conflicting goals that could work toward balancing but in a race such as that for multiple candidates would mean worse results for all those who are not technologically savvy enough to tap the machines.

Simple fix is to go back to paper ballots, hand marked and hand counted in public. The majority of the European countries that tried electronic voting have reverted back to this method. which probably means the US can never do so because we cannot be shown up by them durn Europeans

Given the information provided (but not being a statistician) it looks like there is a plausible case for election fraud in the US and if it occurred in the primaries why would I not consider the possibility of it occurring in the main election. Both sides could be guilty with one just being more adept at it.

And you know that even if the US government found evidence of widespread election fraud, be it foreign or domestic, at this point they would be unable to admit to it without looking even more inept and foolish and you know they will not do that.

@Hypocrisy_Central just a little more. From that report if you scroll down a little less than a third of the way down the screen you will find a graph labeled “2016 Kings County, N.Y Hand-Counted vs Machine-Counted Ballots”

It shows that consistently Clinton came up higher in the machine-counted ballots than Sanders and conversely, Sanders was consistently higher when the same ballots were counted by hand. It doesn’t say that Sanders would have won, only that in every case Clinton won more votes when the machines did the counting. As explained if it were machine error you would expect to see Sanders higher in at least some of the machine counted totals. Now this is just one county, imagine what the cumulative effect is over a state or nation.

I am hoping these same people will do a similar accounting of the national election. I would be interested to see how the numbers graph out.

It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how many times the votes are counted nor which system is used, they never come up with the same total twice. Keep counting until you candidate wins. That’s the trick.

@jaxk Except in this case it was not about who won but about how the system works or doesn’t work. Exposing problems within the system and then modifying the system to eliminate problems is not unreasonable.

It is not.

The voting system is not rigged.

It’s the Public Information system that’s rigged.