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Notes -
I was talking with a local friend who works elections in [red state] and apparently at the end of the night they loaded the local machine-counted sums for the precinct into the back of a personal vehicle (in tamper-sealed boxes) and drove them to the county central counting facility to hand them off. Apparently last time it was just the driver, and this year they were instructed to at least drive together in pairs, potentially followed by the poll watchers.
My thoughts were roughly (1) I think I mostly trust these folks to do the right thing, but (2) it'd be really easy for anything dramatic here to make national headlines, and I'm kind of surprised it hasn't. I guess you have burst pipes as an example, but "DC ballots stolen when election worker gets carjacked on the way to deliver results" seems quite plausible as a random happenstance but also looks a lot like deliberate election fraud. We're IMO lucky that doesn't seem to have happened.
Also that securing a distributed secret ballot is a fundamentally harder problem than most would give credit for.
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