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Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

The 2000 election and voting systems

After the 2000 ‘hanging chad’ election, the Election Commission report concluded that about 10% of votes are never counted or miss-counted. The Republican President and House didn’t much care, threw a few billion at the states some counties replaced the punch card machines w/ electronic voting machines. It made things worse. The election results are still untrustworthy, but in many places there’s no paper record to check but there is a poorly designed and poorly secured software program counting the votes. And yet worse, these voting machine companies are all private, and keep their software a secret, so there is no way to audit the software or check the election results. In the *rare* cases where security researchers have inspected the software and computerized voting machines, they have always proved easy to break into and subvert. Same with the centralized websites counting and recording the votes. Complete failure of democracy.

XKCD comic

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