American Thinker

Something important, uh, on these marks that are created on the ballot is we have a huge library of handmade marks so it’s not a perfect oval that you are going to be able to identify that that was a mark by a machine. But it’s, it’s ah, it’s a library of different random hand marks that looks like somebody else used a Sharpie to vote the ballot. So you are never going to be able to say this is ah, a ballot voted by the accessible uh voter, this is a ballot voted by a person with a Sharpie for example, for, with the mark.
Yeah, again it’s all about preserving voter anonymity, um you know if, if you only have one or two disabled voters in a given precinct an if you’re using standard marking techniques where they’re, uh uh an exact perfect fill of that oval um you would be able to uh distinguish that ballot from somebody that just hand marked it. So this is one of those further steps that we do um to preserve that anonymity.

That's from Eric Coomer, an official with Dominion Voting Systems who allegedly has strong political views favoring Antifa. He said the above during a sales pitch. So let me translate that for you.

His ballot-marking-device is deliberately indistinguishable from a hand-marked ballot. There's no way to tell a printed ballot from a hand-marked one, and this is a deliberate design decision. The claim is it preserves "anonymity" for disabled voters. The reality, in my opinion, is that it makes it difficult to separate printed ballots from hand-filled ones.

This also offers a possible motive for insisting election-day voters in Arizona use Sharpies. The printed ballot marks are designed to resemble Sharpie marks. This would make it that much harder to distinguish printed ballots from hand-filled ones.

The Federalist

While election violations, voter fraud, and uproar about election integrity have recently come into focus for many Americans in 2020, a group of more than 50 election and computer security experts wrote a letter on Monday featured by the New York Times asserting there is “no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome.”

“Anyone asserting that a U.S. election was ‘rigged’ is making an extraordinary claim, one that must be supported by persuasive and verifiable evidence,” the experts wrote in the 2020 statement.

Many of these same experts, however, wrote another letter less than four years ago claiming that U.S. elections were vulnerable to exactly such weaknesses and encouraging improved security to avoid hacks, errors, and fraud.

It's interesting to speculate about what their motives are for this change. Did their push for election security in 2017 (after Trump's victory, broadly blamed on Russian interference that was not connected to hacked voting machines) provide the impetuous for a switch in voting machine technology to something with known vulnerabilities to abuse?