If you ask Patrick Byrne, the founder of the company "Overstock" and one of the most famous conspiracy theorists in the USA, Serbia could play a key role in fixing the elections in America this year. While guesting on the podcast "America, Can We Talk", hosted by Debbie Georgetos, Byrne mentioned the American company "Dominion", which manages a large number of voting machines in the USA, and their branch in Serbia, which maintains them. He added the Chinese "Huawei" to that story, through whose machines, allegedly, the entire work is done. The story simply slides, "Dominion" from Serbia over backdoor he hacks into the machines during voting and changes the results to suit the Democrats. The Chinese are there to make the soup thicker, and because Trump's voters see them as the greatest danger.
Of all this, it is true that there really is a branch of "Dominion" in Serbia, that it operates legally and prides itself on the maintenance of voting machines, that is, the software that runs them, which can be found out even by a cursory internet search. But, if there are really any problems with the counting of votes in the elections, be sure that Serbia will be in the background, as was said eight years ago about North Macedonia and its bot farms that worked in favor of Trump.
The logistics of voting in the US are very interesting because of their diversity. Since each country organizes voting in its own way, then it goes down to the district level, where voting is done from touching the screen to punching cards to rounding the ballot, with the move towards complete automation. The reason is the speed of counting, which is practically instantaneous after the closing of the polls. Setup is not possible because the machines are not connected to the network, everything is recorded on a disk, which is then physically transferred to another place, where it is read. And there is also a paper trail, similar to a fiscal receipt, where the voter can check if his will is correctly registered before putting the ballot in the box.
This year, it will not speed up the results because of the large number of ballots sent by mail, which will have to be counted manually or with the assistance of a machine, but again with manual insertion.
The problem with the electronic voting system is that it is used relatively infrequently, in the US once every two years, and it is not cheap. While technology is changing very quickly, just try to think back to your phone or computer from 2016 or 2012.
Automated voting has been on the rise in recent decades, but it doesn't have to be a guarantee of democracy. For example, it is used in Estonia, Bulgaria, India, the USA and Venezuela, to name just a few of the countries, and it is clear that there are significant differences between them. Most of the world still votes with pen and paper, which has its pros and cons, but is still the least bad. After all, wherever voting takes place, there are automatically ballots ready to be used if the machine "gets stuck", and this happens at some polling station in every election.
Perhaps it would be best to create a hybrid system. To vote on paper, and then count using a mobile phone camera and artificial intelligence. The slips could be arranged on a table, ten at a time, and scanned by phone. Artificial intelligence would sort and count them, and they would remain in the system for any type of verification. All that is required is an application that members of the electoral commission enter into their own phones and which sends the read data to the competent electoral commission. Since the voting has already been done, all manipulations would be at the level of the use of force, which renders the democratic process meaningless. And the paper slips certainly remain as evidence. Unless someone destroys them, but that's still a force.
The technology exists, the system could be easily set up, requires little willpower and minimal training, and control would be extremely simple. The same application could also perform biometric verification of voters, more secure than spray paint and an ID card, but maybe we are a little carried away now.
