Trump: "I did ask Elon because he knows more about computers than anybody I know. I said, what do you think of the voting system? He said, computers are not meant for voting. It's too many transactions taking place too quickly."
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
I was a child when the BBC described the first computerization of UK census data. They showed a machine sorting a stack of punched cards, and then said this computer would be faster.
I thought "Nothing could be faster than what I just saw!"
I spent 44 years in the industry, ending at Microsoft.
Spain has paper ballots with human supervision by civil servants and party observers. 50 years without a single incident. 💯 Reliable results in 6 hours.
One of the problems we have is that a lot of the people who work at polling stations in the US have the mental capacity of a salamander and would be unable to do what Spanish civil servants do.
In fact, three random citizens are enrolled for every ballot box. Several ballot boxes make an polling station. One civil servant supervises the entire station. All political parties can send observers. Normally there are 3 to 4 different parties represented at every ballot box.
Votes are counted by hand publically, the results are written on a form, everyone signs it and gets a copy handed out, the original form is carried to the provincial court, a copy is nailed to the door of the polling station. Results are communicated life to the central in Madrid,
And that's the problem. Computers do "too much transactions too quick". Fraud is too easily automated. Fraud on paper ballots does not scale that well. Too much people must be part of it, takes too much time and space.
I wish I had mad computer skills I'd hack X post a profile pic of Elon,Trump and Putin getting the chain saw to their heads!
Off with their heads! That would be all you could see over and over till they figured out how to fix it!
Everyone knows his minions are probably lining the federal system with software musk doesn’t even realize. Musk isn’t an engineer he’s a nepo baby who invested. Just how fb was stolen from the original creators. He hires the brains
Financial institutions are still sometimes successfully attacked. This is why they spend a lot of $ on cybersecurity and insurance. There is no insurance for our vote. Online voting is not secure. The key is paper ballots + computer counting + a risk limiting audit (RLA) to check the count.
yes, thankfully most Americans (and other large democracies worldwide) vote on paper either by mail, in person, or at least get a paper trail. Paper is important for standard post election audits like RLAs in Colorado and a growing number of states that check the computer vote counts.
I am a software engineer. I also volunteer as a USA poll worker because I value our Democracy.
>155 million people voted in the 2024 USA national elections. Counting paper ballots by hand is error+fraud-prone + very expensive. Machines count the paper ballots + automate the process + reduce errors.
Also a general reform of the whole voting system would be needed. First-past-the-post leads to the 2-party system, which is much easier for malicious hijacking than multiparty system. As you have seen.
Elmo wants to replace air traffic controllers with computers but thinks that voting machines are too risky because computers can't do a lot of calculations really fast
He is nonsensical & ridiculous…does he really believe the crap he spews? He doesn’t seem bright enough to play stupid & be a secret master mind. I mean look at what is currently going on. 😳
Elon Musk … once again proving he has no idea what he’s talking about … and that someone like Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon could completely refute the “too many transactions” malarkey, sits silently by … don’t forget his role in all this …
They are more susceptible to vote strangulation. The save act is making it hard for women who have taken their husbands name to vote. tRumps about to take over the mail system. Poor people & disabled or elderly find it hard to go to ballot boxes. Put fewer boxes or vote stations in blue areas.
It’s far past “musings”. There’s been a lot more data analysis. Coupled with missing, uncounted, unreceived mail-ins, voter roll purges, 🍊 admitting to the cheating on Jan 19…it’s not just musings.
🐎 💩 - if they're good enough for SECURE online banking, they're good enough for voting. It's the crooked media manipulation that makes voting questionable now.
Reference your MIT uncle for the umteenth time like it makes you a stable genius. No fuckin’ way he conferred with anyone at MIT…or that paper is the accurate, most efficient voting process. Can’t wait for Elmo to tell him Rock/Paper/Scissors/Spock is a voting algorithm.
Sheldon would inform you that you forgot the Lizard between Scissors and Spock. And that it is probably the most important variable in this theoretical algorithm because Trump is obviously one of the Lizard People.
Computers are the reason for Musky McMuskface's rash of "rapid unplanned disassemblies" too. Why take the blame when you can point fingers at inanimate boxes of binary processing?
My understanding is that it takes a lot of cycles to update the blockchain to record the transaction. That is separate from the “mining” but still uses a lot of power.
No, each transaction is quick to verify. It's just a bundle of transactions in each block. Proof of work with very high computational complexity (independent of transactions) is then attached to force the sequence of blocks move forwards, that makes it difficult to substitute blocks and catch up.
So making transactions is dependent on a lot of computing power being spent - but they're not spent *on the transaction*, but rather spent on the header of the block that contains the transaction list
I hate to say it but I don’t think the US will ever have another fair election again. He will never leave and Americans were warned. Take a look at Jan6
It feels more like Mao's China. Set the lied-to against the people protecting them from Authoritarianism. And then use the outcome as a warning against any further resistance. All carried out by an exclusive group that is dividing up the loot.
No. Not too much for the computer, but computers can do too much transactions and too fast.
Fraud on paper ballots is slow, takes space and lots of people. Hence it's easy to detect. It doesn't scale well. Fraud with computer can be easily automated and is hard to detect.
How is that? We have lots of video material and other proof of Russians stuffing the ballots. Everybody knows, that they are not fair elections. The problem is not, that the fraud is not detected. They just can't / won't do anything about it.
No, voting is too hard for computers because he lies every time he opens his mouth and he wants to take over the post office to get rid of the ballots he doesn’t like—control the sending & receiving. To use tech to match mail with voter data and magically watch dem votes disappear.
OMG! Well then we'd best get the NY Stock Exchange back to paper stock tickets in a hurry. Because those computers handle more transactions in a second than the vote computers do the entire voting session. 🤦
Nonsense. I volunteer as a polling worker in the USA to support our Democracy.
Voting machines in most states don't transmit every individual vote. They store results (with redundancy) and then transmit data to central computers once polls close. Throughput is much less than many IT systems.
That makes no sense. There are good reasons for being wary about computerized voting systems, but the number or speed of transactions isn’t even a factor. Credit card companies handle transaction volumes much greater than that on a daily basis.
The same guy says crypto can replace currency across the world . Because it can scale … voting system nah man 140 million transactions in 16 hours… impossible.
Musk is literally destroying people wholesale with no remorse. In fact, he has been gleeful and joyous for killing life-saving programs, taking away careers and livelihoods, opening our lands up to pollution, killing disease research ... all for money & power. Doesn't get more antichrist than that.
I bought some groceries as Stop and Shop yesterday and the computer only charged me for half the stuff because the checker was real fast. This is how Germans save a lot on food.
The function of computers in counting votes is being an easier to use more accurate adding machine. In the pre-voting stage, making vetting registered voters more accurate, faster, and offering easier voting (like early voting at another location).
Hey! Would you be willing to share this as an image or PDF? I would love to take a closer look but I hesitate to open Google docs links from strangers on the internet.
Here’s some screenshots of the first two pages! And that’s wise of you, but the benefit of the doc link is the video link column so you can watch and judge for yourself.
Proves yet again he is a complete know-nothing, dumb as a rock idiot! Computers handle millions of calculations/transactions a second but he thinks they can’t handle tabulating votes.
Just a reminder that Trump has publicly stated that Nazilon really "knows" those vote-counting computers and then tied that to his "landslide" win in Pennsylvania.
Knows what? Why would DT be talking to Nazilon about the vote-counting computers? And how did this "knowledge" cause a Trump victory?
i think about those statements every day. it always sounded pretty damn conceivable to me, although i could make a persuasive argument that america would rather self-destruct than elect a black woman to be president.
Ummm... too many transactions too quickly? How on earth does a payment system or an online gambling site manage their surges in transactions?
(That said, as a Canadian, I'm a big fan of paper ballots. However we don't have to vote for every job from premier to dogcatcher, which simplifies things.)
Oh, that's cool. So why all the fuss about software and voting machines being weird? (presumably because not ALL elections follow the paper/scanner process)
Also: paper ballots + scanners = the ease and certaintly of paper records and the speed of computer tallying with the option to hand count anything that seems off. (Some of our nuttier politicians are against the scanners, which is just silly, they're the same as we use to mark standardized tests.)
Was he talking about voting machines or crypto and block chain? Because cryptocurrency on Blockchain is not meant for everyday spending. It's too many transactions taking place too quickly. Voting systems don't even need any transactions. Just one upload after polls close. UDP, baby! No transactions
How many security trades are made every day? Computers messing up the stock market are they? I’m not sure why people think Elon is smart. The guy knows nothing about anything.
🤣🤣🤣 - "Elon [...] knows more about computers than anybody [...]". That says more about Trump's computer knowledge than Elon's. I do not share that sentiment.
paper ballots are literally the most secure way to vote. paper ballots are countable and re-countable. fraud of paper ballots is ridiculously difficult at scale. paper ballots are essential to democracy.
Yet another suspicious comment to put next to all the others. How many do we have now from Trump, Musk and his son, talking about these voting machines?
Coincidences seldom occur in a sequence.
Apparently Musk has never heard of chips. That’s what chips do. Does he have any idea how many phone calls, texts and internet searches the telecommunications companies handle in a single second?!?!?!
Sorry, my phone company career showing here…
“Too many transactions taking place too quickly”- not the guy I want building space ships or “fixing” the Air Traffic Control system, or doing anything actually.
Visa processes nearly 1 Billion transactions a day, but sure…computers famous for not being able to handle volumes of data quickly. If you have a Tesla and self driving software, this should be a red flag for you.
I mean even if you don’t work in tech…this doesn’t pass the sniff test. I mean the iPhone has the computational power of a room full of supercomputers from 1995 ffs.
Most states do use hand marked paper ballots. A few use machines that produce a paper record for scanning. The only state where voters use direct recording electronic voting machines without a paper printout is Louisiana.
He is laying the groundwork, one way or another, to disrupt future elections. By he I mean Elon, because the orange idiot is simply a vessel that many are using to spew out their nonsense. He is indebted to Elon and massively stupid.
Sheesh. The difficulty of a fully digital system would be protecting against tampering/altering, not the actual ability to process the data. The latter is the easy part.
Same... Indeed, i tend to think I know nothing despite I know some things but informatics is such a wide knowledge area that is impossible to know it all. Anyone who thinks to know a lot is a complete moron imho.
if I have to stand in line on election day for 12hrs and show 20 forms of ID and include a drop of blood on a paper ballot completed with a quill pen to vote him out I’m there
Hmmm, amazing that computers can accurately handle ~147million credit card transactions in a day (2023 CapitalOne data), which is more than twice as many transactions as the ~60million people who voted election day. (83million voted early)
In other words, Elon is uninformed or just plain ignorant.
Twitter handles 500 million tweets a day, but machines dedicated to 1 task, broken down by state/municipality, can't handle less than 40 million transactions? (assuming CA with 40mm people voting would be a very over estimate)
Between National and local persons and ballot measures. It’s really more like 12×40,000,000 except that not everybody votes so it’s 12 times less than 40 million.
exactly, if Twitter can handle the daily traffic at 500mm, no reason local machines couldn't. All of this is moot anyway, we have been electronically, computer assisted voting for decades.
I hope Musk realizes Trump just made him look like an idiot, then fires back with a tweet that he said no such thing and Trump got it wrong. Trump then will think Musk made him look like an idiot, and they can go to war with each other. Trump can ban EVs and Musk can publish his blackmail fodder
EM hacked into our federal government agencies & seized control of the United States Goverment. Seems pretty likely he did the same with our election 2 keep his ass out of prison & weaken the U.S. 2 hand more power 2 China. Seems like someone should look into this?
Credit card transactions are reversible. Voting is not.
Using a computer to produce a physical ballot that a human could check is one thing, but I wouldn’t trust an entirely electronic voting system, especially not with these assholes pushing the literal buttons.
This is true but “trump says stupid thing” is such low level background radiation at this point it’s almost not worth acknowledging, so I tend to gloss over it.
Most ridiculous thing about this Trump idiocy is that he tries to rope in Musk & make another reference to his “genius” uncle from MIT to back up this nonsense….and no one in the room pushes back or even laughs out loud.
Computers are the reason he’s in office right now. All those called in bomb threats gave Musk and his underlings enough time to shoot those algorithms in to change votes.
I'm actually comforted that he's not pushing computer vote systems. One way I thought he'd try to steal the next election could have been to somehow get some particular brand of computer voting installed nationwide, that he (and Elon) already knows how to hack.
Why does this idiot think about elections? In 3 years he will be out of the game. No? Will he flush the American constitution down the toilet?
Are you Americans really willing to let your democracy be destroyed by a mentally ill person?
There are roughly 160 million citizens registered to vote. Even a "toy" database like sqlite running on an iPhone SE can handle 160 million inserts (new records added to the database) in 12-15 minutes.
Comments
I thought "Nothing could be faster than what I just saw!"
I spent 44 years in the industry, ending at Microsoft.
Not just when it comes to ballot-counting.
Off with their heads! That would be all you could see over and over till they figured out how to fix it!
Man that plays Diablo IV for 14 hours on Christmas
Fraud with paper ballots is slow and takes space. Fraud with computers can be automated, it's fast, does not take visible space and is hard to detect.
https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI
1) People fill in paper bubble ballots and machine scans the paper, which means that results can always be cross-checked w/physical paper
2) Voters fill out touchscreen then machine prints paper ballot
It makes the voting machine an expensive pencil though.
>155 million people voted in the 2024 USA national elections. Counting paper ballots by hand is error+fraud-prone + very expensive. Machines count the paper ballots + automate the process + reduce errors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gCyRkpPe8&t=5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaKFx5rxdmA
Are we sure Elon is a genius?
Even with a preferential system, 90% of the results are still known on the night of the election.
It's worked for 100 years or so.
Are paper ballots more susceptible to fraud?
Fraud on paper ballots is slow, takes space and lots of people. Hence it's easy to detect. It doesn't scale well. Fraud with computer can be easily automated and is hard to detect.
Electronic voting can make fraud undetectable.
brazilians knows this to the heart as we transitioned from this flawed, slow system to a modern, fast electronic machine
3 decades in and no signs of fraud anywhere
Voting machines in most states don't transmit every individual vote. They store results (with redundancy) and then transmit data to central computers once polls close. Throughput is much less than many IT systems.
No, I never believed it.
As crazed as he is I doubt Elon ever said that.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRi7znDZO2DdckeFiCKznAfhNR2tcQ7d0UCbL61RzZsy59YLI7HkConaf10CsRhieTvWjwYaHc4vNtS/pubhtml
Knows what? Why would DT be talking to Nazilon about the vote-counting computers? And how did this "knowledge" cause a Trump victory?
(That said, as a Canadian, I'm a big fan of paper ballots. However we don't have to vote for every job from premier to dogcatcher, which simplifies things.)
Coincidences seldom occur in a sequence.
Sorry, my phone company career showing here…
“Because they are really bad at the thing they are best at. “
See…whenever he uses this format about MIT, you know he has told a whopper of a lie.
https://youtu.be/0LN65qFUDDo
Know
Much about computers.
- Me, software engineer
In other words, Elon is uninformed or just plain ignorant.
Elon & Trump must believe that these transactions are all processed by hand…or they think their cult members are stupid enough to believe that.
Using a computer to produce a physical ballot that a human could check is one thing, but I wouldn’t trust an entirely electronic voting system, especially not with these assholes pushing the literal buttons.
Since 1995.
The first machines were produced by Diebold. But over time local firms took over production, and the OS now is based on Linux.
The problems are all deliberate acts of voter suppression, and computerization would just streamline that.
📣ON MARCH 4TH,
WE MARCH FORTH!📣
March for what was promised,
LIFE LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS !
🗽🇺🇲✊🏽✊🏻✊🏿✊🏾✊🏼🇺🇲🗽
🇺🇲2/28/2025 24hr Don't buy anything ECONOMIC BLACKOUT
🇺🇲3/4/2025 WE MARCH 4TH!
🇺🇲3/7-3/14/2025 BOYCOTT Amazon WEEK
🇺🇲3/14/2025 NATIONAL STRIKE No work 24 Hours
Are you Americans really willing to let your democracy be destroyed by a mentally ill person?
Trump is sick. Very sick.
Electronic voting and tabulation is enormously vulnerable.
We should do like Canada regularly, and the Dutch did when threatened in 2017 and use paper ballots with hand counts.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/02/amid-hacking-and-false-news-fears-dutch-hand-count-vote/97387582/
@electiontruth.bsky.social
Care to comment on this?
https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/bestpractices/Election_Audits_Across_the_United_States.pdf