I notice that the story says "ballots" and "ballots destroyed" after two years, as per AZ state law.
That means that AZ has paper ballots. Further, the ballots are human readable. A hand re-count was conducted.
This is all good practice, CO, WA and CA (at least) do the same. But it means that "voting machines" is a misnomer at best. The machines so named are tabulators at best. Any accusations of Chinese, or Venezualan or Ukrainian tampering with "voting machines", or talk of "PCAPs" showing mysterious tampering is almost certainly propaganda in service of Trump's authoritarian takeover.
It's not like the 2000 presidential election. Some states, Florida included, used actual voting machines, where no per-voter-ballot existed, and hand recounts were impossible. It seems to me that since that election was decided by 5 votes, shenanigans could actually have been done.
Hand recounts are almost never performed. So tampering with tabulation machines could easily sway an election.
I’m the last person to believe the Jan 6 conspiracy theory (I’m more inclined to think the accusations of fraud were a pre-emptive strike to discredit anyone challenging the next election). But there is absolutely positively incentive for both domestic and foreign interests to interfere with the machines.
The ProPublica article specifically said "hand recount". That was in April of 2021, as I read The Internet.
There's also risk limiting audits done by most or all vote-by-mail states. The selection of ballots that are used in the audit is via randomly seeded RNG. I've only looked at Colorado:s RLA in detail, but it seems like RLA would be done by hand. I wrote a program to simulate CO's RLA algorithm so I can understand it. It detected "wrong candidate won" with far fewer audited ballots than "correct candidate won".
I agree about the incentive to tamper. Qanon Tina Peters did so, as did a Republican team led by Sidney "release the kraken" Powell, in Coffee County, GA in 2021.
TFA may have been about a hand recount, but the comment I was originally responding to seemed to suggest the existence of paper ballots negated the incentive to tamper with the computers.
Do those vote by mail states that audit audit only mail ballots? Or also ballots tallied at polling places? Because there are very few states that are mail-only; and mail ballots typically reflect different demographics and thus different voting tendencies than in-person ballots.
My state tallies paper ballots by machine, and doesn’t even show me whether it read my ballot correctly. I just have to take it on faith that tallies are correct and never tampered with.
Sorry, I misread you. Paper ballots don't eliminate incentives for tampering, but they certainly lessen them, and make it harder. Paper ballots can be recounted, by hand if need be, and audited (risk limiting audits). Nothing will eliminate the incentive to tamper if ideology pushes it (Qanon) or policy positions are religious doctrine, but very unpopular (use imagination). We can certainly decrease the incentives.
My state (CO) emails me when my ballot is in the mail, when they receive it back from me, and after it's counted. Practices vary, I guess.
This raises another question: what happens to mail in ballots of Trump and Project 2025 destroy or privatize the USPS?
Telling you the ballot has been counted isn’t the same as counting it, counting it correctly, or protecting the count from tampering.
Paper ballots and the possibility of a recount decreases the tampering incentive only if there’s sufficient reason to expect a recount. Given the rarity of recounts, that doesn’t seem to me like much of a deterrent.
ETA: re mail-in ballots and the USPS, that’s an incentive to vote in person if you can. It’s a legit concern for those for whom voting in person is problematic. I’m personally far more worried about the integrity of the count — and frankly, whether we’ll get to vote in a “free and fair” election at all. After all, even Russia still has “elections”.
> Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say