I’m back! Sorry to have missed the last few tourist seasons. I hear activists are still at it with scare tactics about Georgia’s voting machines. Well, you should listen to them! I ignored the science as Mayor of Amity encouraged everyone to get back in the water. Never again!

12/DDP's belief that Georgia's elections are safe and secure rests on the wishful thinking of officials, who, like me, engage in the same thinking errors. We opened the beaches because we did not update our beliefs to match the undesirable information from true experts.

11/One of the safeguards is the claimed difficulty of accessing the machines. When it was disclosed the voting systems were exposed to the public in a security breach. Officials failed to update their prior beliefs about system security.

10/GA officials try to explain why they are still less wrong: “The procedural safeguards we have in place mitigate these hypothetical scenarios from happening. It’s extremely unlikely that any bad actor would be able to exploit our voting systems in the real world. ”

9/On the other hand, the undesirable information is formidable. It comes, for example, from CISA, the nation's cybersecurity agency, detailing the vulnerabilities of Georgia's election system. Vulnerabilities Affecting Dominion Voting Systems ImageCast X

8/There is other desirable information supporting GA officials' beliefs. For example, there is no evidence that Georgia's election systems were hacked in the 2020 elections ("everyone is enjoying the predator-fee beach")

7/As experts on election technology point out, "Raffensperger has lumped [them] with the election deniers." It's the election version of cardboard shark fins. https://t.co/soBozWR0VV

6/GASOS told lawmakers "It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket” than that hackers flip enough votes to swing the election."

5/Citing layers of physical security measures, Georgia officials believe that outsiders are baselessly exaggerating the danger of cyberattacks on their state election systems.

4/The Desirability Bias is the tendency of people to update their prior beliefs to incorporate new desirable information more than new but undesirable information. It's an effect observed and measured hundreds of times in human decision-making:

3/My perception of reality was skewed. Humans overestimate the likelihood of desirable events (shark reports are hoaxes) and underestimate the likelihood of undesirable events (a great white still gobbling tourists) This is called Desirability Bias:

2/I believed outsiders baselessly exaggerated the danger of shark attacks--a useful belief. I was genuinely "pleased and happy to report we caught a large predator" and still claim, "As you can see, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time."

1 of 12/Like me, Georgia officials are wrong about election security. Desirability bias means they believe they're less wrong than if they had listened to the experts. I now know it's a dangerous thinking error. Jaws shark cardboard fin scene https://t.co/NvHzxwMob0 via @YouTube

How easy it is to keep the people you don’t want to vote from voting.

13/To Discount/minimize threats is a moral problem: “If I choose not to reveal the whole truth, not only am I taking agency from the person I’m withholding from, I am also attempting to control their feelings towards me for my own benefit…” — @Treacle_A

12/Like the persistent nasty sharks offshore, these and dozens of other threats are unlikely to disappear. https://t.co/aDlxqbw04L

11/Human Error: Fulton County officials scanned 3,000 ballots twice during the 2020 election recount, but investigators could not tell whether the ballots were counted twice. This introduced a new level of uncertainty into an already fraught climate. https://t.co/5doPB03SZR

10/Misconfiguration: Electronic voting systems are complex and have a history of errors resulting from misconfigured computers. Voters in Northampton, PA, were alarmed by ballot printouts that didn't match the votes they had submitted. https://t.co/U8l9DBBuWP

9/3rd Party Threats: Ransomware attacks target infrastructure that elections need. In early 2024, an attack on Fulton County targeted various systems used to run the government. As a result, officials shut down connections to voter registration systems. https://t.co/JBkBDob2JN

8//Software Supply Chain: Election software developers use sophisticated suites of programming tools that can be compromised months or years before the voting machine software is delivered. The result is a malicious “backdoor.” https://t.co/KFZU5eEJgH

7/Insider Threats: Sometimes, trust in the people who operate election systems is misplaced. When this happens, insiders can gain control of an entire system. This happened in rural Coffee County, Georgia, in January 2021. https://t.co/cLecD1TO4e