How to ensure fair election tally

Was our presidential election hacked?

As I watched the 2016 presidential election night results, I was surprised to see the detail of results in each voting district and the accuracy of the news commentators as they analyzed and compared them to past elections. This is the kind of information one would need to manipulate votes and keep suspicions low.

The districts that are historically close are the ones that could be manipulated. The actual changing of votes that are cast using voting machines without a printed paper ballot is possible.

Of all our many computer systems, these are the most outdated. It’s not known what accuracy should be expected but the errors would logically be about the same for all parties.

Once each voting district feeds their results into the state totals, some manipulation is again possible by using machine language (1 or 0) to alter results. Numerical functions within the computer combine 1’s and 0’s to form real numbers. An example would be converting 101 which is a 5 to a 001 which is a 1. Depending on which column is changed, this would produce a very significant error.

Personally, I don’t think the 2016 election results were changed by a cyber attack, but why not be safe. We could institute a policy to check our computerized election system.

It could be as simple as having every 10th voter use a paper ballot. These would be counted manually with oversight from each political party as has been done for 200 years.

These totals would be kept separate and not added to the computerized total until election results are final. This separate vote total should reflect the popular vote for each state. If it does not, this should trigger an automatic recount and election process audit.

This story was originally published December 15, 2016 at 3:11 PM with the headline "How to ensure fair election tally."