There are a number of reason why Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in England did so well in the recent UK election, compared to Bernie Sanders failed attempt to win the Democratic Primary, but today I want to focus on just one. In the UK electronic voting machines are not in place. They use paper ballots. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that many UK pols are pushing for e-voting machines for the next election.

Lord Malloch-Brown

Britain’s Outdated Voting System Risks Leaving Millions Voiceless in the EU Referendum

Our outdated voting system also risks disenfranchising overseas voters. More than one million Britons living in other EU countries will be directly impacted by a leave vote yet it would be hard to invent a harder way for them to cast their ballot. The Electoral Commission is now warning those abroad that there may not be enough time for postal ballots to make it back in time instead suggesting they vote by proxy. Secondly, pen and paper ballots are the slowest to process, easiest to manipulate and therefore most at risk of fraud and error. The elections in May offered a scary glimpse of what we can expect on 23 June - missing votes, insecure paper votes and unintentionally spoilt ballots. In a tight, nationwide vote count fraud and error at the margins could have a significant impact on the outcome.

Yes, those pesky paper ballots which are so ripe for fraud and error. And they turn off young people. Not like in the United Sates where e-voting has been around for over a decade. Right?

From the Executive Summary of "Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries"

The widespread and illegal efforts to manipulate the election results in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries are not the only visible indications of election fraud. EJUSA has also identified irregular patterns in precinct-level Democratic vote tallies which are strongly suggestive of electronic voting machine tampering. In all eleven primaries where discrepancies between exit polling and official results exceeded the margin of error, the discrepancy favored Hillary Clinton. Democracy Lost treats the controversy over exit polling discrepancies with in-depth argumentation and statistical regression analysis.

Exit polling has been used throughout the world as a means to verify election results. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) stated in their 2015 booklet “Assessing and Verifying Election Results,” [e]xit polls are powerful analytical tools … [a] discrepancy between the votes reported by voters and official results may suggest that results have been manipulated.” [...] Many US states use touch-screen computer voting systems that do not even generate a papertrail. Almost all ballots, whether paper or not, are counted by computers. All counting is non-transparent and inaccessible for verification by the public. The few states that audit the computer counts by hand only examine a tiny percentage of the ballots and even this count is not performed according to proper statistical procedures. In other words, the results of our elections, based on computer counts, are largely unverified.

It seems that some people in Britain recognize the dangers that e-voting machine pose to the integrity of their elections. For example, read the following from "Why we don't have electronic voting" in The Telegraph:

Let's think it through. We're talking about an IT system that needs to do the following: verify the identity of around 50 million users within a 15 hour period; register their votes, but anonymously so that no connection can *ever* be made between verified identity and vote cast; store the data behind those votes in a fashion that allows independent verification and checking after election, and in a form that absolutely cannot be altered or manipulated after the fact; and do all this without any scope whatever for hacking, penetration or even just crashing during the voting period. Just to be clear, failing even slightly on any one of those things will undermine one of the foundations of our system of governance, acceptance of the democratic legitimacy of our government.

It's ironic in the extreme that we continue to use easily hackable, unverifiable and non-transparent voting machines in large parts of our country. The latest leaked NSA report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which provided no proof that Russia hacked into our voting systems, did clearly identify this as a major problem for the integrity of US elections by pointing out how easy it is for someone with even modest hacking skills to break into the software that controls voter registration systems.

According to [Jake Williams, founder of computer security firm Rendition Infosec and formerly of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team] if this type of [spearphishing] attack [described in the NSA report] were successful, the perpetrator would possess “unlimited” capacity for siphoning away items of interest. “Once the user opens up that email [attachment],” Williams explained, “the attacker has all the same capabilities that the user does.” Vikram Thakur, a senior research manager at Symantec’s Security Response Team, told The Intercept that in cases like this the “quantity of exfiltrated data is only limited by the controls put in place by network administrators.” Data theft of this variety is typically encrypted, meaning anyone observing an infected network wouldn’t be able to see what exactly was being removed but should certainly be able to tell something was afoot, Williams added. Overall, the method is one of “medium sophistication,” Williams said, one that “practically any hacker can pull off.”

We haven't had a clean election since before these e-voting machines were installed. It's highly likely John Kerry lost the election to Bush in 2004 due to the hacking of e-voting machines in Ohio. No one can say with any degree of certainty that our elections have been valid for some time, thanks in large part to the widespread use of e-voting machines. Until we return to paper ballots and rid ourselves of these infernal e-voting machines, our election results cannot be trusted, and anyone who has faith that our votes are counted accurately is deluding themselves.