[EFruit]

Thinking from a different perspective, in a majority mail-in election, could these machines pose a risk to the election's integrity? They would most likely not be undergoing the same scrutiny as electronic voting systems (which in many places is already a very low bar...), and they are most likely vulnerable to as many other problems and exploits as any other system.

[organsnyder]

They're not responsible for counting votes. In many states (maybe most/all?), there is additional tracking done by the state department overseeing the elections to track when ballots are received. For instance, in Michigan I can check the MI Secretary of State's website to verify that my ballot has been counted.

[pxeboot]

Hypothetically, could they could be used to 'accidentally" route hundreds of ballots from an important zip code through nowhere Alaska, causing them to be delayed weeks/months and not counted?

[jcrawfordor]

Quite possibly, but this would be easily detectable after the fact as standard mail-in voting practices provide end-to-end tracking of the ballot. Most election security measures, including ballot stuffing in most systems, are really only detected after the fact.

[sangli]

I worked for a company that manufactured these machines including electro-mechanical systems as well as the software that used for configuration and generating reports.

The way it works is, these machines would either read the printed barcode or take a picture of the label and run through OCR engine, use the zip+4 and sort them to a bin based on some configuration. Then these bins would go on a truck to their destination.

The machines are not doing the routing. So your fears are unfounded.

[toast0]

How is sorting into a bin that goes onto a truck not routing?

Presumably different bins are set to go onto different trucks, and if the important county elections official's barcode/zip+4 gets binned to alaska, that could cause confusion and delay. More nefarious (and also more unlikely) would be if ballots sent out to zip+4 with registered X party gets binned wrong, delaying receipt of ballots, perhaps.

Although, I would expect there's likely enough volume of returned ballots to fill their own bin, and whoever puts the bins on the truck is going to notice if they're on the wrong truck.

[sangli]

Because what the machines do is sorting. Routing is totally different part of it. They are two different and distinct parts.

[corobo]

If it’s sorted wrong it’s routed wrong.. bit pedantic

[djaque]

Let's not sit around and speculate. Do you have any data to back up your claim that sorting machines undermine election security? If there's any truth here then surely states that have been voting by mail for decades would have noticed.

[randyrand]

You generally start with a hypothesis before conducting research. There is likely no research yet.