[hiringmanager]

I care a great deal about the quality of elections in the USA and have been watching this issue since the 1990s. In 2001 there were real problems exposed, not just hanging chads but real problems with the way software counted votes. Result massaging is a real thing.

In 2004 I worked for a third party candidate, who had a direct line to live numbers as they came in. He also called to thank me that evening. One of the things he related to me was that they were watching vote counts as they got announced and he was doing very well, but once he hit a certain threshold the software seemed to switch and he would start losing votes.

This isn't a case of his percentage going down as more votes were counted, but his absolute vote count going down as more votes were counted-- something that should be an impossibility. And not just in one precinct but in dozens of them, particularly in areas of a particular software maker's machines.

I don't consider the elections valid because the machines that count the votes have closed source software and come from two politically connected companies.

The sad thing is that MIT described a solution that would allow online voting in such a way that anyone could independently audit the election without knowing who voted for whom (you could verify that your vote was in fact counted and that the total count is correct, but not know who your neighbor voted for)... they announced this in the 1990s I believe, but of course it wasn't adopted.