Senators Demand To Know Why Election Vendors Still Sell Voting Machines With 'Known Vulnerabilities' (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Four senior senators have called on the largest U.S. voting machine makers to explain why they continue to sell devices with "known vulnerabilities," ahead of upcoming critical elections. The letter, sent Wednesday, calls on election equipment makers ES&S, Dominion Voting and Hart InterCivic to explain why they continue to sell decades-old machines, which the senators say contain security flaws that could undermine the results of elections if exploited. "The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on," said the letter sent by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Gary Peters (D-MI), the most senior Democrats on the Rules, Intelligence, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, respectively. "Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been a lack of meaningful innovation in the election vendor industry and our democracy is paying the price," the letter adds.

Their primary concern is that the three companies have more than 90 percent of the U.S. election equipment market share but their voting machines lack paper ballots or auditability, making it impossible to know if a vote was accurately counted in the event of a bug. Yet, these are the same devices tens of millions of voters will use in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger said it will respond to the letter it received. The ranking Democrats say paper ballots are "basic necessities" for a reliable voting system, but the companies still produce machines that don't produce paper results.

Comments

You know it's funny

[rsilvergun]

how they're all Democrats. Ok, it's not that funny. In fact, it's not funny at all. It's more than a little messed up actually.

Re:You know it's funny

[Immerman]

It's got nothing to do with Trump (unless you're implying he won because the election was rigged?)

Election integrity is the single most important aspect of a democracy, and the fact that apparently only Democrats seem concerned with the fact that so many of our elections can be easily and invisibly rigged should be deeply disturbing. *Especially* to Republican-leaning voters, since it means that at best their politicians don't actually care about election integrity, and at worst intend to rig elections so that they don't have to depend on your support to maintain power.

Re:You know it's funny

[fafalone]

Have you looked into *why* people are calling them racist for their Voter ID laws? I agreed with Voter ID before I did. They actively make it harder for poor areas to obtain a suitable ID, and disallow legitimate ID types that are still government-issued that are more likely to be possessed by the poor while allowing ID types like college IDs more likely to be possessed by the more wealthy. There's burdens in time and money required to get a DMV ID that are significant obstacles for the very poor, and Republicans are unwilling to address them, and actively exacerbate them with their placement of DMV facilities, their operation hours, and their staffing levels-- they attack all of those points to favor wealthy white areas and hurt poor, minority-populated areas.
If you take a look at my post history you'll see I'm extremely hostile to the identity politics bullshit, so if I'm calling out a seemingly neutral policy as racist, you can bet it's for cause. Look into it yourself. If Republicans supported addressing the problems I described above, I'd be right there with you arguing it's not a racial issue, but they're not only not addressing them, they're making them worse, and in a specifically targeted manner.

Then there's also the point that Republicans have lied over and over about wide-scale voter fraud that ID checks would prevent; it simply doesn't exist, so the fact they're lying about their motive is just one more item in the list of why in this case, it is indeed either a race issue, or targeted in a way that so closely correlates without fact-based justification (e.g. there is a reason to more heavily police certain areas, but not to relocate DMV offices away from them) to it that there's no meaningful difference.

Re:You know it's funny

[nine-times]

It's also important to note that there's been a long history of the US trying to suppress minorities from voting. As soon as black people had the right to vote, there were laws specifically designed to make it hard for them to vote. So when someone suddenly proposes a new law that makes it harder to vote, and seems like it would disproportionately affect minorities, it should be understandable that people would be suspicious. They should be prepared to make a case why the change is needed, and how they're going to prevent any disparities in who faces hardship in voting.

"Election Vendors"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's really *quite* fitting. And instantly makes the title answer the question.

Re:See you in prison, Trumptards.

[sexconker]

3 million more votes? What are you talking about? Trump won 306 to 232.