[HN Gopher] Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords...
___________________________________________________________________
Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after
accidental leak
Author : rbanffy
Score : 215 points
Date : 2024-10-31 22:42 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| grugagag wrote:
| Is voting fraud at stake here or leak info over who voted? Is it
| possible to infer who voted what from the leak?
| wbl wrote:
| No, because of the way CO runs elections. But it is possible to
| gin up fraud claims and then resort to violence if the
| candidate who did this before loses again.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| That just seems so unlikely. What sort of out-of-touch ego
| monster, bigger than Jesus, flaming asshole would do this?
| hammock wrote:
| If you broaden fraud to include interference, suppression, etc
| yes absolutely
| cushpush wrote:
| Uh oh. Ignorance of computing showing. IF they need two passwords
| to combine to make one, but sometimes have one of them, they just
| need to brute the other open... I think it's a bigger problem
| than the administration understands, unless the passwords are for
| something inert like wattage delivered to the machine.
| leereeves wrote:
| Can you brute force a BIOS password without prolonged physical
| access?
|
| The leak does increase the risk of a single trusted insider
| messing with the system, though.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I personally don't put much trust in the security of BIOS
| vendors. My desktop's motherboard straight up displays the
| BIOS password if you read the right EFI boot variable
| (obfuscated with some proprietary "encryption" algorithm with
| a hard coded key).
|
| Based on previous reports on the security of devices like
| these, I wouldn't be surprised if a quick flash dump of the
| NVRAM is enough to crack the password in seconds already.
| Perhaps voting machine manufacturers have finally made it too
| difficult to disassemble these machines in a short amount of
| time, but that's historically not been very difficult.
|
| I would reckon the access time needed to hack+access the BIOS
| lies in the area of "a few minutes, twice", not the kind of
| prolonged physical access you'd need to brute force the
| password.
|
| That's not exactly "someone posing as a voter could hack the
| machine", luckily, but then again apparently at least one
| hacker at DEF CON found a vulnerability in voting machines
| this year that won't be fixed before the upcoming American
| elections, so who knows if there's an exploit like that lying
| around.
| cushpush wrote:
| Every vote counts. The problem is that some votes are
| counted twice.
| cushpush wrote:
| "Can you without prolonged access?" Hahaha have you heard of
| any of the three letter agencies and what they have on hand?
| Do you know what a rainbow table is? Is this a tech forum, or
| just newbies trolling experts?
| leereeves wrote:
| I guess I wasn't clear. I'm asking you to describe exactly
| what scenario you're imagining. You can't simply assume the
| attacker already has the bios password hash. How do they
| get that? And if they can get that, why do they still need
| to brute force the bios password? Why can't they do what
| they need to do already?
|
| Do you know of a vulnerability that allows someone to
| access the bios password hash but can't also be used to
| hack the election without bothering with the bios password?
| EasyMark wrote:
| these machines aren't hooked up to the internet, how are you
| going to brute force every machine that a community uses and
| also requires physical proximity?
| cushpush wrote:
| Are the machines physically incapable of internet?
| laxmin wrote:
| The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system,
| no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on
| a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of
| them is challenging, etc.
|
| The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a
| matter of when, not if.
| db1234 wrote:
| Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization
| involved at various levels during distribution making it
| difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there
| is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a
| process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and
| improve it.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at
| all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable
| system used for many large elections. Even if complicated
| machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping
| it simple increases public confidence.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| Scale is a bit of an issue.
|
| We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have
| about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on
| average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore
| votes, in under 10 hours.
|
| Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical
| challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.
|
| One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture
| very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but
| a ballot box does not).
|
| At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer
| of security.
| echoangle wrote:
| For everyone wondering: 100 crore is 1 billion, 70 crore
| is 700 million.
|
| Why do you need the result in under 10 hours?
| cafard wrote:
| I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election
| can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of
| congress, state senator, three state representatives, a
| county councilmember or two, a member of the board of
| education etc.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| More bits of paper. The ballot papers around here are
| bloated oversize monstrosities (picture A3 sized) due to
| the number of parties and candidates but you get a
| separate one for each election. Unfortunately not every
| area is paper only.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Here we don't even put names on the ballot, instead there
| is number assigned for each, this scales up to hundreds
| of candidates. This does prevent write ins, but I see no
| reason why you could not have own ballot for each purpose
| and then say colour code them and append letter or two in
| front of each candidate for each election.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| I don't see how the median voter can be confident in
| making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to
| write out a list of opcodes anymore.
| anon291 wrote:
| If the speed of tabulation is the main reason then why
| are results no longer known by election night? They're
| saying it might be days again. When we had paper ballots,
| we knew that night. (For America)
| gruez wrote:
| >When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For
| America)
|
| You forgot about 2000. Also, the main reason for the
| delays are mail-in ballots, which could be delayed for
| days/weeks, depending on how lenient the deadlines are.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 2000 was punch cards and it came down to a razor thin 500
| votes in a single swing state.
|
| By law the mail-in ballots have to be in by election day.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Scalable? Not for same-day. I'd be fine waiting a few days
| if needed, though. Heck, early voting means I wait for
| weeks now.
|
| Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple
| elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes
| every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with
| computers.
|
| I think the totals from every precinct could be made public
| in a way that they are verifiable from a central database,
| where the numbers add up to the total for the state and
| eventually federal count.
|
| This is probably already happening, but people don't seem
| to think so.
| bpye wrote:
| The UK manages to produce results within a few hours and
| all ballots, at least for general elections, are hand
| counted.
|
| I agree that for voting systems other than FPTP it is
| more work and may take longer - but it's not an
| intractable problem.
| wreckdropibex wrote:
| Same-day? It is not a problem at all. For example Finland
| calculates enough paper ballots in hours to give a
| definitive result, I am sure there are other countries
| that manage it as well. Your imagination is stuck in the
| world of voting practices of your side of the pond.
| jfengel wrote:
| Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're
| under 24 years old.
|
| The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper
| ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to
| this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the
| margin of error.
|
| That's when electronic machines came in. They are not
| necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that
| nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Those were punch card ballots and trying to determine if
| indented or "hanging chads" were votes or not
| rcxdude wrote:
| That was punch-card ballots, which are also crap. Most of
| Europe uses a piece of paper you mark with an 'X' in pen
| or pencil.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived
| through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of
| paper ballots.
|
| I lived through that, it wasn't that big a deal, and I
| still think fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. No
| system is perfect, but paper ballots work and work well.
| crooked-v wrote:
| In the case of India, keep in mind that the country still
| has a significant illiteracy rate (about 20% as of 2018)
| and plenty of people who have literally never used a paper
| form in their lives. One of the key design goals of the
| machines is to try and reduce the education needed as much
| as possible while still keeping things more private and
| efficient than voice votes.
| albert_e wrote:
| Curious to know more. Is there a good source of information on
| the security of the hardware and software used for elections
| India.
|
| As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset
| in large swathe of things implemented by both public and
| private actors. Many things get better only though iterative
| failures and corresponding reactive fixes.
|
| What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or
| instances of demonstrated hardness against those with
| motivation and access to machinery.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| IIRC it uses tamper evident hardware.
|
| There was an interview with one of the Profs who designed the
| EVMs here.
| viewtransform wrote:
| Electronic Voting Machine/Elections in India
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHJZrXrnyQ
|
| The Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) do simple counting of
| key presses and keep tally of the totals.
|
| The machines are not reprogrammable, run on alkaline
| batteries and have no WiFi/Bluetooth, USB or ethernet.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I think random, serialized paper ballots are the way to go.
| When the polls close you know the serial numbers of every vote
| cast, so no new serial numbers should be added to that unless a
| very good reason. Keep them or destroy them afterwards is
| another issue, but it's a step in the right direction.
|
| I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with
| the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are
| run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions,
| I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal
| elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is
| not already, managed and controlled by the federal government,
| then I think there could be greater control and security.
| zie wrote:
| Go be a poll worker in your local election. See if you change
| your mind.
| saxonww wrote:
| What do you do when duplicate serial numbers start showing
| up? I'm assuming you won't know who was issued which serial
| number, and if it's truly randomized you wouldn't even know
| where they were sent.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Then you have clear proof of election fraud and the FBI,
| NSA, etc can get to work. Invalidate the election results
| and do a new one.
| macintux wrote:
| > Invalidate the election results and do a new one.
|
| The chaos that would ensue from this is staggering.
| zo1 wrote:
| Much better to just deny it till after the new government
| is in, then make a nothing-burger out of all the news
| that is reported "afterwards"? Meanwhile, 50% of your
| country is disenfranchised for X-years because it was
| "less chaos" to just accept the vote and move on.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| 'Just do a new election' is not a valid fallback.
| kmoser wrote:
| Not valid why? Lack of political will, or logistically
| unfeasible?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| How would they "get to work"?
|
| And your proposed resolution means someone could DoS an
| election by copying their ballot and submitting it.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| For one duplicate?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/08/vg-2024-how-your-vote-gets-
| co...
|
| Colorado ballot envelopes already have a bar code -
| essentially your "serial number".
|
| I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because everyone who
| thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know
| anything about how elections work.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Virtually all the election deniers live in a sphere of
| unreality where they only listen to what their
| politicians/keepers tell them, they don't care about
| reality.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not
| know anything about how elections work.
|
| Does your knowledge imply the system is perfect? Is there
| more than one type of voter fraud? Do we mean just one or
| two particular federal elections or all elections at every
| level? What about internal party elections, have those all
| been extremely fair and above board lately?
|
| There's obvious advantages to perpetrating this class of
| fraud. Historically we know this fraud has interfered in
| all types of elections at all levels. Why would this not
| continue to be a target?
|
| I mean, even in your link, Step 1 includes mailing ballots
| in. Even recently we've seen the simple flaws in this
| insecure mechanism. How could you have such a level of
| confidence in this system? The fact the smart and well
| meaning people do is all the more reason to engage this
| subject more rigorously.
|
| Perhaps a more generous interpretation to people making
| these claims is to understand that we are still not doing a
| good enough job at making our elections secure, easy, free
| and fair. For Hacker News this should easily be understood
| to be a technical challenge and one that the USA has yet
| again completely failed to succeed at.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's not a technical challenge, it's a sociological one.
| No amount of technical security features or published
| explanations will convince a group of people who have
| already decided they are being screwed by "the system".
|
| I do agree that America is failing this test.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Oh hey looks like I found one of the ballots sent to
| everyone in the state and filled it out and sent it back
| in.
|
| It's literally that easy in Colorado.
| ytpete wrote:
| No it's not. Your signature would have to match the one
| on file.
|
| Further, if the person the ballot rightfully belonged to
| actually wants to vote, they'll either request a new one
| or vote in person - either one of which would invalidate
| the earlier mailed ballot.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The last thing we need is to Federalize voting. Our system is
| robust BECAUSE it is local. The last thing I'd want is a
| Federal system under a President's influence.
| hollerith wrote:
| Can you think of a reason why the people who wrote the rules
| we have now would want to avoid putting federal elected
| officials in charge or running federal elections?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| It's a matter of when, if, and, if we will ever know
| endgame wrote:
| Just use paper, and count by hand on the day.
|
| You need to present an election system that will convince Joe
| Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this
| forum, is probably not even white-collar or university
| educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-
| proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property.
| Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the
| election results until something breaks.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| Unfortunately, hand-counting causes more errors than
| electronic counting, except in very small communities.
|
| Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-
| reports/hand...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's not so much about errors tbh - paper votes can be re-
| counted as often as needed. The fear is that voting
| machines are insecure, its input or results tampered with,
| and then you can't do a recount. Unless they generate a
| paper receipt as well that the voter _has_ to confirm
| before the vote is counted.
| cwalv wrote:
| The machine prints a paper record at the same time.
| Couldn't they just read off the paper record as easily as
| recounting paper ballots?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The voter-verified paper record for use in audit
| (including recount) purposes has been a federal law
| requirement in effect since January 1, 2006, for voting
| machines (adopted under the Help America Vote Act of
| 2002.)
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| > Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the
| voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.
|
| Indeed! I've volunteered at polling places where this is
| done.
|
| I think one reason polling places have gravitated towards
| the "use paper ballots for everything, which are then
| scanned" option is because you're likely going to have
| something like that anyway, for mail-in ballots. It does
| bring problems, but you still have the paper to fall back
| to.
| arp242 wrote:
| > paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed
|
| That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago.
|
| In principle I don't really disagree, but just saying the
| problems run rather deeper than just hand-counting vs.
| electronic voting. The one time a recount actually would
| have been useful it was stopped for highly legalistic
| reasons that are hard to explain to a normal person. Not
| only that, it's highly likely - perhaps even probable -
| that Gore won Florida, although we'll never know for
| sure.
|
| I see no reason it would play out any different today. We
| all saw what happened during the last election.
|
| Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the
| perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really
| sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted.
| Given the very small margins in some states, even a very
| small error rate (malicious or otherwise) can really
| matter. Perhaps this is paranoid, but I fully expect
| Trumpdroids to try to cheat. Any idiot can cheat a
| handcount "by accident" (prove it otherwise), but
| actually tampering with voting machines is operationally
| much more complex, and not something any ol' yahoo can
| easily pull off (need not just technical knowledge, but
| also physical access).
|
| tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| > That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years
| ago.
|
| Which is one of the reasons why the Help America Vote
| Act[0] was passed two years later.
|
| > The one time a recount actually would have been
| useful...
|
| I understand things are stressful, but please avoid
| resorting to hyperbole. There are other times in American
| history when a recount has changed the result. For
| example, see the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial
| election[2].
|
| > Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the
| perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really
| sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted.
|
| > tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.
|
| Be an observer.
|
| Seriously: Be an observer. For example, Orange County
| (California) has their public notice[2] inviting "the
| public" (that's you!) to observe election operations.
| Tomorrow, assuming you're in a place that allows early
| voting, go to a polling place or vote center (or whatever
| they're called there) and observe. On (and after)
| Election Day, go to your county's registrar of voters (or
| whatever they are called where you are) and observe the
| tally. Learn how to call out when something is wrong, and
| learn how to "observe the observers" to call out if they
| say something is wrong (assuming you think their call is
| BS.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act
|
| [1]: https://ocvote.gov/sites/default/files/elections/gen
| 2024/Pub...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubern
| atorial_...
| akira2501 wrote:
| A high speed electronic ballot reader with a mechanical
| counter display. So you can stand there and watch it count.
| Then run it through a duplicate machine. It should say the
| same thing.
|
| Appropriately documenting these occurrences should not be
| hard. Appropriately archiving them would be moderately
| difficult but would serve as the evidence of the final tally.
| The final tally of all precincts could then be calculated by
| any number of independent organizations.
|
| There can't be any hard to understand computer voodoo,
| deleteable audit logs, or single vendor reporting the final
| tally. No one should trust that anyways.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| > The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a
| matter of when, not if.
|
| The US election system is very distributed and fragmented -
| there is virtually no standardization.
|
| Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd
| need to have seriously good data to figure out which random
| municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually
| affect the outcome.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Ironically America's fragmentary and incoherent electoral
| system makes it extremely hard to steal an election there.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| You say "fragmentary and incoherent", I say
| "decentralized".
| goodlinks wrote:
| Decentralised could be each counter putting 5000 or so
| ballots into piles with people wandering around
| witnessing for various parties all working a rigid
| process accross the nation. Each count publically
| announced in the room before witnesses.
|
| Totally standardised, coordinated, and decentralised. But
| fragmented (structuraly) or incoherent.
|
| But agree would be a million times worse with a single
| electronic system
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wouldn't you only need to target a handful of battleground
| districts/states? No point in trying to turn Vermont red or
| Wyoming blue.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. You think it
| would be unfeasible to flip 500 votes in a critical swing
| state with such a system?
| acdha wrote:
| The question is how to know which county you need to do
| that in. The more you try, the greater the odds of being
| caught but with margins that small you'd need to attempt
| multiple states and predict rather accurately how many
| votes you need to win but not to attract too much
| scrutiny.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Moreover the problem there isn't the distributed/local
| control of voting, but the College.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > to figure out which random municipality voting system(s)
| you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
|
| As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts
| reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can
| interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and
| you can get the information on other precincts before any
| other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this.
|
| It's essentially the Superman II version of interfering with
| an election. Just put your thumb on the scale a little bit
| everywhere on late precincts all at once.
|
| The fact that so many states let a simple majority of their
| state take _all_ electors actually makes this possible. If
| more states removed the Unit Rule and went like Nebraska and
| Maine this would be far less effective.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| > As you said, no standardization, which means all
| precincts reports on wildly different time intervals
|
| There is standardization within all precincts of a county.
| And from my past experience as a poll worker, I can tell
| you why precinct reporting times can vary wildly within a
| county.
|
| (Note things I say here are specific to the county where I
| worked.)
|
| Anyone in line to vote by 8PM is allowed to vote. We (the
| other poll workers and I) could not start closing the polls
| until every voter had voted. If the local community did not
| trust vote-by-mail, then that polling place will likely see
| delays in closing due to lines.
|
| One polling place often covered multiple precincts, so
| you'll see multiple precincts delayed simultaneously.
|
| After that, boxes go from one queue to another, with
| multiple queues consolidating into one or two. So, a one-
| minute delay in dropping off your box to a collection
| point, may mean a two-hour delay in that box being
| processed.
|
| > if you can interfere with just tallying
|
| First off, that would require a remarkable amount of fraud.
| Second, that's why there are observers. It doesn't matter
| if it's 2AM on the Wednesday after election day: If
| tabulating is happening, you are allowed to observe.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Is this type of system not vulnerable to a supply chain attack?
| neverartful wrote:
| When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for
| political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines
| for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were
| stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who
| had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did
| have wheels though).
|
| Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical
| lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you
| would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for
| each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big
| mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the
| lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset
| all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were
| mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when
| the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and
| presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported
| to the whoever they reported the results to.
|
| This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and
| should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack
| into electronically as the voting machines contain no
| electronics (at least for communications, for sure).
|
| The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored
| somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur
| expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).
|
| Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were
| voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a
| protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.
|
| All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to
| thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting
| integrity.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Mechanical punch-card voting machines fell out of use after
| the 2000 election showed that they're more error-prone than
| either electronic voting machines or paper ballots.
| tupolef wrote:
| The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving
| realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
|
| Everything else is a scam.
|
| It would mean no secrecy of vote, but I think that secrecy of
| vote is for places that are new to democracy.
|
| It could be anonymised to a point a clever system of personal
| certificats, but the idea is that in a 100 people district, the
| citizens should be able to count themselves and check if their
| real votes are correctly registred.
|
| If the list is public, everyone got a proof of vote and can
| confirm that the global list is correct localy, then there is no
| way to hide cheating.
| stuaxo wrote:
| There are ways of doing this using encryption so that the
| person will know what their own vote is in a way that others
| don't.
| tupolef wrote:
| But, there is still someone somewhere that distribute the
| certificats and can link you to your vote so why try to hide
| something that can leak. It will leak.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| We have a major party candidate right now saying his
| political opponents should face a firing squad and you're
| asking "why try to hide something that can leak?"
|
| https://x.com/atrupar/status/1852209432878342308
| tupolef wrote:
| But, should we deceive people like the tech companies are
| doing right now with privacy?
|
| If someone is scared that his position will be known and
| still do it only because there is some fakely advertised
| security in place, you may ruin that person's life againt
| their will.
|
| I prefer a system where people know how things work, take
| risks and are responsible. For what do we need a
| democracy if people are so scared of their family,
| neighbours and coworkers political views. The way we do
| democracy should me more mature after all this time.
| Probably the only place in the world trying to do it
| right is Switzerland, per example they have frequent
| local votations accomplished by raising one's hand.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Take risks like having their husbands beating them to
| death after an election because they voted for the wrong
| person?
| tupolef wrote:
| If there is a risk that a husband would beat his wife in
| this case and that she could not leave him, there is no
| way that any form of electronic vote would change her
| life, or even her childrens. People who protect this
| system will probably rig the votes to keep it or a
| similar one.
|
| I don't know any big change in the past, anywhere, like a
| big social progress, a regime change, a revolution or a
| coup that was enabled by a mass or anonymous voters. I
| think that if you look into it, you will find that it's
| always with a large consent or when a group of people
| takes action openly to push for it.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > If there is a risk that a husband would beat his wife
| in this case and that she could not leave him, there is
| no way that any form of electronic vote would change her
| life, or even her childrens. People who protect this
| system will probably rig the votes to keep it or a
| similar one.
|
| What? There are people in America who live under this
| threat today, and yes voting can actually change
| important parts of their lives.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| > There are people in America who live under this threat
| today
|
| Women under threat of their spouse _beating them to
| death_ for voting "incorrectly"? Can you link to some
| examples of this? Like testimony of women who came
| forward fearing their spouses, not just in general terms
| but on this specific issue of voting?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| You don't think domestic abusers try to control their
| partners' right to vote under threat of physical
| violence?
|
| What parts of the country have you lived in?
| willy_k wrote:
| It's pretty clear that he is saying that Liz Cheney is a
| war hawk but might change that stance if she found
| herself on the other side of said hawking. Your statement
| is technically correct but like many other
| interpretations of his statements, forgoes context and
| intent to make an easy point.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The context is that he has been publicly calling for a
| televised military tribunal for Cheney (who is not in the
| military) for quite a while now, but since he's a senile
| old man who "weaved" this into an argument against
| hawkishness, the right wing can play dumb.
| rightbyte wrote:
| A firing squad implies execution. It is quite
| disingenuous to pretend the quote is about that.
|
| The quote is about her in a war setting with a rifle of
| her own.
|
| Maybe 'Battle Royale' or 'Hunger Games' as an execution
| but that is kinda far fetched.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| "Let's put her with a rifle..."
|
| Since when do people facing firing squads get issued a
| rifle of their own? How do you explain this language he
| is using?
|
| To me it's clear he meant "put her in combat facing a
| squad of adversaries" (US Army squads are 9 men, USMC are
| 13), essentially calling her a coward/chickenhawk.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Sure if you omit the times he's called for televised
| military tribunals for Cheney, an American citizen who
| has never served in the military. As already addressed
| below, the fact that he's "weaving" (deliriously free-
| associating) various arguments together isn't a good
| defense.
| mFixman wrote:
| "Prove that you voted for Putin or you are out of a job".
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| Which is what troubles me about making auditable digital
| voting systems. I'm not sure how you could do it while
| preserving the secret ballot.
|
| About the best I can come up with is a QR code displayed on
| the screen and on a printout that you can compare with a
| third party phone app. Machine results are tabulated, and
| the QR code sheet is put in a lock box separately. This at
| least provides some way to compare what the computer says
| you voted versus the QR backup ballot for audits. I'm sure
| there are holes in my idea.
| gruez wrote:
| >About the best I can come up with is a QR code displayed
| on the screen and on a printout that you can compare with
| a third party phone app.
|
| That's definitely not secret. If you can audit it on your
| phone, baddies can force you to show your phone to verify
| that you voted "correctly".
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| It's not, but I'm saying you have the option to compare
| the two with an outside reference at the time of voting.
| You keeping the result on your phone after would be
| entirely your decision.
| gruez wrote:
| >You keeping the result on your phone after would be
| entirely your decision.
|
| And what happens if baddies come to your house before the
| election, and say that after election day they'll check
| up on you, and if you don't they'll beat you up?
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| Cryptographers are clever and have figured out a way to let
| you know your vote was counted without being able to prove
| it to a third party!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho
| echoangle wrote:
| Can the average person trust this though?
| myth2018 wrote:
| > The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving
| realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
|
| The secrecy on individual votes has a good reason to exist.
| Votes are already bought based on per-section public results,
| imagine what would happen if individual votes were public.
|
| Moreover, people under any sort of threat (communities
| dominated by drug dealers, employees of a dishonest,
| politically engaged business owner) would be in big trouble.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving
| realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
|
| How about having the voter verify a printed copy of their
| electronic vote before the machine casts the ballot and then
| counting the paper ballots afterwards to verify the tally with
| the machine. Two way verification. Problem solved.
|
| Since 2016, with the help of activists over the country, NJ and
| many otther states switched to electronic machines with paper
| records validated by the voter. Unfortunately the part about
| counting the paper ballots afterwards varies between states.
| ytpete wrote:
| I believe since 2002 all electronic voting machines must
| produce a paper receipt like that, due to the Help America
| Vote Act.
|
| I don't think most states hand-check _every_ single ballot,
| but I 'd be shocked if there are any that don't perform
| random audits where _some_ sampling of the receipt are hand-
| checked.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The value of secrecy is for protecting wives, mothers, etc from
| violence and punishment. the same is also true in local
| elections in particular. You could be ostracized from public
| services in a heart beat if they knew your vote. I can think of
| a hundred other reasons why a secret ballot is better than a
| public ballot. A secret ballot is necessary for safety,
| courtesy, and well being of a society.
| arp242 wrote:
| Also see: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2024/nov/01/women-cancel...
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > Everything else is a scam.
|
| There is no evidence of voting systems in the US being "scams".
|
| This monster under the bed mentality is getting tiresome.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Yes. These are all social problems.
| aftbit wrote:
| I hate the narratives around voting security in the US. One side
| says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud, most secure
| election in history, etc etc. The other side claims that the
| election was completely stolen from them by voting machines.
|
| Neither of these claims is right. Personally, I doubt the
| election was stolen. I know of a handful of cases of voter fraud
| both anecdotally ("My mom [in a retirement home] told me to vote
| for McCain, but I know she really wanted to vote for Obama, so
| that's what I put.") and numerically[1].
|
| I would not be surprised if one or two of the very razor thin
| House district elections in 2020 experienced enough fraud to flip
| the decision. This doesn't mean that I believe all of the
| Dominion voting system hack nonsense or anything like that. I
| just think only a Sith deals in absolutes.
|
| 1: https://apnews.com/article/ohio-voters-citizenship-
| referrals...
| Spivak wrote:
| This is a wild amount of both-sidesing in a case where one side
| has evidence and the other is literally an unsubstantiated
| conspiracy theory at a scale where you could not keep the
| secret.
|
| Most secure in history is (in my state) is correct. There are
| more pointless safeguards than have ever existed. If you were
| willing to go with the results of any election pre 2020 then
| you should be overjoyed at how much more "secure" the process
| is. That's the point that's being made, the amount of provable
| voter fraud that bypasses the checks and is only discovered
| after the fact is nil
|
| The article you cited is literally the system working. There's
| 11 million people in Ohio, the number of illegal registrations
| is several orders of magnitude less than the lizardman constant
| and they were nonetheless caught.
| anon291 wrote:
| Including the safeguards where observers are safely kept away
| from the counting! There were a lot of irregularities in
| 2020. The supreme Court recently said Pennsylvania should not
| have counted some of the ballots it did in 2020 (policy
| change by secretary of state vs legislature).
| gruez wrote:
| >There were a lot of irregularities in 2020.
|
| Source? I thought all the election fraud
| lawsuits/investigations for the 2020 election basically
| went nowhere?
| anon291 wrote:
| For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes.
| Courts aren't going to question a presidential election.
| That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of
| observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal
| extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various
| ballot drops etc.
|
| Opinions aren't formed on court cases. That's why in
| 2020, more than half of Democrats thought the election
| was irregular. It's remarkable to me because this is one
| of those issues where polling says voters of both parties
| agree, but the media insists that there's nothing there.
| That's crazy
| gruez wrote:
| >For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes.
| Courts aren't going to question a presidential election.
|
| ???
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
|
| >That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of
| observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal
| extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various
| ballot drops etc.
|
| My impression is that there were a bunch of "this seems
| sus" allegations, but all the popular ones have been
| discredited. What are the most credible examples (ie. of
| actual malfeasance going on, rather than merely "this
| seems sus") that you can provide?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yeah it's just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump
| nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who
| looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from
| casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of
| research about how things work.
|
| The accusations are always vague as well since each time
| you zoom in on one it's completely anodyne but you need
| the distance to keep up the specter of something
| nefarious.
| anon291 wrote:
| I guess for me personally I don't deny that Joe Biden won
| the contest as performed. I just question the contest
| themselves. After all, if made up my own election law and
| ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no
| one would listen to me, but that's what happened here,
| which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether
| secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in
| Pennsylvania.
| acdha wrote:
| > that's what happened here
|
| What precisely happened here? Can you specify which
| ruling you're talking about and why you think it's so
| significant?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I am going to take a guess as to what the GP was
| referring to: In 2020, Pennsylvania was one of the states
| that made many changes to how their elections work under
| the guise of the pandemic. But they changed their rules
| at the last minute once more in a way that may have
| altered Pennsylvania's outcomes.
|
| Existing state law meant ballots had to be received by 8
| p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. The
| Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to extend that deadline
| and the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court (not SCOTUS)
| made a highly controversial ruling that extended the
| deadline to the following Friday. This extension would
| have helped Biden (given his party filed the lawsuit to
| force the change), and given they barely won the state
| (Biden had 50.01%), there is a good chance it affected
| the outcome.
| acdha wrote:
| Are you referring to Republican Party of Pennsylvania v.
| Boockvar over the 3 day extension of the received date?
| Those ballots were collected separately but there were
| less than 10k of them so even if they'd been 100% Biden
| voters they wouldn't have affected the outcome of a race
| which Biden won by 80k votes.
| anon291 wrote:
| Yeah, and if you look at my comments, I agree that Biden
| won the race as run. I just question the entire
| legitimacy of counting any of the votes in a rogue
| election. I don't think rogue elections should happen.
| The moral hazard is too great, and it's a direct attack
| on democratic processes.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, my point is that "rogue election" as a term is using
| the language of deniers. Every election has mistakes, and
| the pandemic especially created novel challenges, but
| that's a strong term to use if the best you can say is
| that a statistically insignificant number of ballots were
| challenged with no evidence of misconduct.
| anon291 wrote:
| Mistakes sure. This was intentionally done though.
|
| It's a strong term but there is no denial. I'm not even
| sure why people are so against calling out the obvious.
| Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest
| acdha wrote:
| What was intentionally done? Every election has ballots
| received late but that's almost always human error, not
| someone trying to cheat, and in this case there's been no
| evidence of that despite a massive effort looking for
| anything amiss.
|
| > Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest
|
| That's why you're getting pushback: he did a legitimate
| contest. The language you've been using has implied
| otherwise, which is implicitly throwing in with the
| convicted fraudsters.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I am referring to a case filed by the Democratic party of
| Pennsylvania (not republicans), and I don't recall the
| numbers off the top of my head but when it was in the
| news it was expected that the case would affect a few
| million votes from mail in ballots that had not yet been
| returned. Mail in ballots were mostly requested by
| Democratic voters. The ruling also had some other changes
| that I can't recall. Also I forgot to mention that state
| supreme court deciding the case had a Democratic
| supermajority.
|
| To me this situation felt like a manipulation of the
| election process that is outside of the norms, especially
| for it to happen so late. That was a few years ago but it
| is an example situation that causes many to still feel
| the election was "stolen". I think lots of people use
| that term to also include actions that are technically
| legal but feel unfair.
| acdha wrote:
| Try to find a reference. The date component makes it
| sound like Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar,
| whose decision lead to both the case I mentioned and
| SCOTUS requiring such ballots to be held separately so
| they could be removed based on the decision of that case.
| The major discrepancy is that you're talking millions and
| that only affected thousands.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there is a good chance it affected the outcome_
|
| Of the state? Maybe. Of the election? No. Biden won 306
| to 232 [1]. Pennsylvania only has 19 EVs. It wasn't the
| tipping-point state.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_pr
| esident...
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I meant the state, although a sister comment to yours
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032946) claims
| the affected number of ballots was too small (which
| doesn't match my recollection but sharing it here for
| balance). Regardless - although I am open to the
| possibility of various issues or flaws in various states
| adding up to something more, I personally am confident
| Biden won the election, for what it's worth. I do have my
| doubts about the overall process though - voting is just
| the very end step, but there are things that happen
| before that can skew election results (media bias, social
| media censorship, whatever).
| gruez wrote:
| >After all, if made up my own election law and ran an
| election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one
| would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which
| we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether
| secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in
| Pennsylvania.
|
| 1. what happened in Pennsylvania?
|
| 2. why did a SCOTUS with 6-3 majority of republicans
| decide to side with Biden, of all people?
|
| 3. you haven't answered my previous question. what
| specific "irregularities" lead to you to not believe the
| official election results?
| anon291 wrote:
| Honestly, your line of questioning is a non-sequitur,
| because I don't question the election results. I question
| the election itself. There is no doubt in my mind that
| Joe Biden had enough votes in the contest as run. I just
| think the contest is not a legal election since they
| didn't follow the law.
|
| As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box
| outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules,
| and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest
| the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate
| election, the law has to be followed.
|
| Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread
| bipartisan belief that the election was irregular. I'm
| honestly shocked at how different the mainstream media
| views are from the everyday person you talk to.
| gruez wrote:
| >As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box
| outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules,
| and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest
| the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate
| election, the law has to be followed.
|
| >Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread
| bipartisan belief that the election was irregular.
|
| The implication here seems to be that because the
| election was "irregular", that it wasn't legitimate. But
| what does "irregular" mean, and should the irregularities
| be the basis for overturning/ignoring the results of the
| election? For instance, the election happened in a
| pandemic. That's arguably pretty "irregular", and
| probably had a material impact on the results. Should the
| results be tossed on the basis of that alone? In other
| comments you mentioned other objections, like counting
| votes that turned up late, but it's not clear that
| tossing out those votes would make the election more
| legitimate. What's more irregular, sticking to the letter
| of the law exactly, and letting all the pandemic
| disruptions affect campaigning/turnout, or adding
| accommodations?
| anon291 wrote:
| The irregularity is not following the written law when
| conducting the election and instead making up rules.
|
| These were not mistakes. The secretaries of state
| announced that they were going to ignore election law.
| That should not be tolerated. It's an attack on democracy
| of the highest order.
| Spivak wrote:
| It might just be the neuro-spicy in me but Pennsylvania
| seems morally in the right here even when the courts
| ruled against them. The rules as set are really dumb and
| Pennsylvania was counting valid unambiguous ballots. The
| election as run was to me _better_ than the one following
| the letter. How shitty would it be to have your vote
| thrown out because you didn 't put it in the special
| double envelope that's for preserving your anonymity--
| the state doesn't give a shit if the ballot is anonymous
| when counting.
|
| I get that this is a privileged take because broadly
| speaking the more people vote overall the better
| Democrats do but it's really hard to fault throwing out
| fewer ballots. Like turnout is already so low and a
| person took the time to make their voice heard. People
| already feel like their vote doesn't matter, dqs for
| arbitrary reasons aren't helping.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean I guess it's a viewpoint on who ought to set the
| rules. I actually don't even disagree with you, and I'm a
| sworn Republican. However, the moral hazard and threat to
| democracy of bureaucrat and officials overriding
| legislative policy is something I dislike basically
| universally, especially for elections
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > Yeah it's just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump
| nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who
| looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from
| casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of
| research about how things work.
|
| The majority of the cases relating to that election were
| dismissed for various technicalities, not on merit. As in
| the judges didn't laugh them out of the court based on
| the ideas in those cases. Of course they may have also
| been rejected on merits but we won't know.
| acdha wrote:
| I think it's worth remembering that Trump's AG, campaign,
| and RNC lawyers were all clear that he lost fairly. The
| cases he brought trying to overturn the results were most
| commonly rejected not on technicalities but because he
| couldn't show evidence of a wrong, and were often
| dismissed with prejudice and in a surprising number of
| cases the possibility of penalties for frivolous lawsuits
| which you just don't tend to see at that level because
| the national players have not historically been trawling
| for anything they could possibly use.
|
| There's a good list here, and it makes it clear that
| these cases were simply not going anywhere. The rulings
| aren't technicalities like "you filed at 12:01 and the
| deadline was 11:59" but the failure to provide evidence
| of a problem even occurring in real life.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
| election_lawsuits_related...
| mythrwy wrote:
| Yes drop boxes and mail in ballots with no signature
| verification and the counting done largely by one side of the
| partisan divide (county/state employees) is totally 100%
| secure what could go wrong? Those conspiracy nuts just don't
| get it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They had a very long hand-counted ballot audit of the 2020
| election in Arizona in 2021, and after (iirc) a few
| _months_ of double and triple checking they were unable to
| find any irregularities.
| ytpete wrote:
| Every polling place and every vote-counting center is open
| to observers from both parties, by law. Your idea that one
| party is shut out of this system has no basis in reality.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Nope.
|
| There is a lawsuit right now in Georgia over the decision
| by some locations to accept ballots over the weekend
| without GOP observers present. Counting without
| bipartisan observers happened frequently in 2020.
|
| Also "observers" weren't mentioned in my original post.
| Just because someone watches a count is irrelevant to my
| original points.
| Spivak wrote:
| You mean the one that was rejected? The lawsuit was wrong
| legally and morally-- these are people who are eligible
| to vote casting their vote in a _more secure manner_ than
| mailing it in, and doing so prior to election day.
|
| There's just no moral defense of rule-lawyering to throw
| out valid ballots or turn away voters, and judges in red
| and blue states alike aren't having it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Junk mail democracy is the most insecure model for an
| election I could possibly conceive. Other than entrusting
| closed source software companies with tabulating votes.
| Spivak wrote:
| So why do red states who have every incentive to remove
| vote-by-mail entirely not do so? You can vote by mail in
| every state, lots of red states are no-excuse.
| ytpete wrote:
| Almost every state lets you vote in person instead if you
| prefer. And if you do, any mail-in ballots that were sent
| out under your name are null and void. So if you don't
| trust it, just vote in person and problem solved.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > One side says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud,
| most secure election in history
|
| Additionally, the sides have completely flipped. Utterly
| bizarre.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not bizarre at all. It's BS, but it's not bizarre.
|
| Politics has become trench warfare. Everything is a battle to
| the death to keep the other side from gaining an inch
| anywhere. And, as is often the case in warfare, truth is a
| casualty. Both sides will say absolutely anything to keep
| anyone from thinking that the other side has a valid point.
|
| It's advertising, but without any truth-in-advertising laws.
| Or, if you prefer, it's propaganda. Any relationship to the
| truth is purely accidental.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The true casualty is America's credibility abroad. In
| pretty much every capital, embassy, boardroom, etc... it
| noticeably declines year on year.
|
| Even the Brits don't take anything at face value anymore.
| anon291 wrote:
| Our credibility has been suddenly made synonymous with
| how willing we are to go to war on behalf of other
| countries . We are not
|
| But I think any attack on an American force will get you
| a quick lesson on our credibility, which, as an American,
| is all I really care about.
|
| Similarly economically, good luck not participating in
| the American markets.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I really don't want to burst your bubble... but do you
| not realize this is seen as a joke abroad?
|
| e.g. In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and
| executives are rushing to wine and dine people who
| literally celebrate the defeat of 'American force' in
| public, on the record, every year.
|
| They treat even a random third secretary for some party
| committee 100km from Hanoi much much better than the 90th
| percentile upper middle class American household in the
| Bay Area...
|
| Edit: And I'm not even going to talk about Eastern Europe
| or the Middle East, it's really too harsh to put into
| writing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Hanoi? Are you refering to pulling out of Vietnam made
| the US seem like a joke? Or that the locals are wrong to
| celebrate that?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| What exactly are you confused about? It seems pretty
| clearly spelled out.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It just seemed so absurd wanting American diplomats to be
| salty about the Vietnam War.
|
| Like, the _Vietnam War_. I don 't even know where to
| begin.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Uhhh... you might need to work on your reading
| comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on
| to me?
|
| Why would I be 'salty' about anything anyone does in
| Hanoi?
|
| It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting
| enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except
| for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives
| are rushing to wine and dine people who literally
| celebrate the defeat of 'American force' in public, on
| the record, every year.
|
| I read that as that your are implying that the American
| diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their
| independence as an insult versus the American diplomats.
|
| This further implies that the American diplomats should
| be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or
| something.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I am not an American diplomat...???
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You said something that he found unclear (so did I). He
| asked for clarification. You refused to give it. And now
| you mock his reading comprehension? Since at least two of
| us couldn't be sure what you meant, maybe you should work
| on writing less cryptically.
|
| Also, site guidelines call for charitable interpretation.
| When someone asks you to clarify, _assume they need it
| clarified_.
| anon291 wrote:
| I'm confused. You're upset that America has made peace
| with Vietnam and treats its diplomats to courtesy state
| dinners and such? Who cares?
|
| The Cold War ended almost 30 years ago. I don't live in
| the past. I look forward to a glorious future, where we
| can even work with dirty commies. If the people of
| Vietnam don't like their government, they should feel
| free to overthrow it.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I'm not upset? It's a factual example, that's what 'e.g.'
| means...
|
| It's not some fanfiction story I made up while reading a
| novel...
| anon291 wrote:
| I don't care if America wines and dines commie
| Vietnamese.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Okay...?
| arp242 wrote:
| This is the kind of boring "both side-ism" that I just
| don't understand. I have no great love of either party, but
| one side is openly speculating about all sorts of things
| that cannot be described as anything other than outright
| authoritarian, and the other party ... is not. And no, some
| disagreements on free speech or the 2nd amendment or
| whatnot is not even close. And no, "oh, he's not really
| serious about it" doesn't fly either.
|
| And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony
| Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its
| own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer
| and rarer. And it's not just Trump - remember the madness
| and obstructionism of the Obama years?
|
| And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could
| have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both
| sides" issue.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The issue in question was truth, not authoritarianism.
| Specifically, the issue was truth about election
| security. The point was that both sides will, and have,
| claim election fraud when they lose, and "most secure
| election in history" when they win.
|
| More generally: In the current election, Harris isn't the
| firehose of lies that Trump is. She isn't a shining
| beacon of truth, either.
| arp242 wrote:
| "Most secure election in history" was a superlative I'm
| not happy with either, no. But the core of it is correct:
| there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud.
|
| The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud,
| rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.
|
| Equating these two is just bizarre. "Murder, arson, and
| jaywalking". Or something like that.
|
| And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when
| they lose" is just not true. There have been a few
| disagreements over the decades of course, some more
| reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has
| happened in recent history, from either party.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud.
|
| Agreed. There were 60+ court cases, but not _evidence_ of
| fraud.
|
| > The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud,
| rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.
|
| Also agreed.
|
| > Equating these two is just bizarre.
|
| I wasn't.
|
| > And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud
| when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few
| disagreements over the decades of course, some more
| reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has
| happened in recent history, from either party.
|
| I presume you mean 2020, not 2016. Yes, nothing like that
| has happened in recent history... until next week.
|
| But speaking of 2016, I remember a large number of people
| (including Hillary) saying that Hillary "really won"
| because she had more votes than Trump did, as if the
| Electoral College was not a thing. I recall seeing it,
| here on HN, over and over, for months, that Trump wasn't
| "really the legitimate president".
|
| No, nobody actually tried to _do_ anything. Obama didn 't
| tell states to send fake electors to the House for the
| vote. He didn't have a "demonstration of love and
| respect" or whatever Trump is currently trying to paint
| January 6th as. So that's better. Months of talk is
| better than 60 court cases, fake electors, and attempting
| to physically prevent the vote in the House.
|
| Since you seem to keep mis-reading me, I'm going to say
| that again, more clearly: _The two are not comparable._
|
| And yet... the "it's not legitimate because our person
| lost" was still there as a definite idea. The idea wasn't
| election _fraud_ - it was that the Electoral College had
| thwarted the will of the people, and therefore the
| election was somehow illegitimate. Never mind that we had
| rules in place, and we followed the rules, and under the
| rules that were in place, Hillary lost. But no, "it's
| not legitimate".
|
| Nobody ever took it as far as Trump did. But both sides
| de-ligitimatize the other side's victories, if only
| verbally. (Again, "only verbally" is better than
| attacking the Capitol. But it's not as close to "we'll
| see you in four years" as I would wish.)
| willcipriano wrote:
| Notice the Cheneys and John Boltons of the world also have
| seemed to flipped with them.
| anon291 wrote:
| I am happy to say, I've never been on the side of a Cheney.
| Go me!
| sethammons wrote:
| I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D
| this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that
| means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against
| Bush but for Trump?
| anon291 wrote:
| Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush
| years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the
| war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split,
| and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal
| immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the
| health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone
| got on board.
|
| There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush
| GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common
| with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts
| (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so
| this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy
| to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels
| much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is
| what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough'
| around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500
| companies and workers support the democrats, based on
| donation numbers)
|
| For me the big national issue has always been a refusal
| to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no
| new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones,
| including some escalations, but I'm not a radical
| pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just
| don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about
| threats and I don't care about targeted military
| intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they
| send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean
| conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the
| world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their
| guns and go!
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Good thing we fixed the hanging chad issue.
|
| Did Republicans anywhere try to "secure elections" in a way
| that didn't involve curtailing voting rights? Improving
| voting machines, systems, counting, etc. in a way that
| partisan leadership couldn't mess with?
|
| Georgia, I predict, will be a shitshow this year.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| I live in one of if not _the_ most critical county in the
| entire country this election.
|
| It's going to be insane here.
|
| This week alone we've had Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and
| Tim Walz stumping here.
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-
| election...
| callc wrote:
| I'm in the opposite scenario - my vote will not matter
| since my county/state is not close to 50/50.
|
| It's a laughably depressing system. I think (without any
| supporting evidence) the national election system was
| designed to fit to the standards of transportation and
| communication 200+ years ago. It was actually _feasible_
| to vote per state then send one dude on horseback to DC
| to cast the vote for the whole state. That's an OK system
| for the time.
|
| But the fact that each state is given an approximate
| weight for its vote (electoral college system), is
| evidence to how we are trying get to something that looks
| like a nationally counted winner take all election. We're
| just doing it terribly.
|
| If we fixed these issues then election campaigns couldn't
| just focus on swing states and ignore everyone else. The
| game theory would then shift to just needing to convince
| a majority of _all_ voters to vote for you.
| sethammons wrote:
| Should there be no balance between state size? California
| always determining the president and ensuring Montana and
| Rhode Island are never campaigned in?
| tzs wrote:
| Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or
| other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections
| and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be
| found for them.
|
| Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were _not_
| allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The
| issue there was a badly designed ballots and /or badly
| designed voting machines that let to a large number of
| spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one
| candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major
| county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one
| they intended to mark.
|
| All the controversy there after the election was how to
| resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging
| chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of
| the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that
| would not be without controversy.
|
| Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did
| not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the
| design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate
| other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a
| completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure
| for dealing with it.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| What I meant was, the security of electronic voting
| machines _in general_.
|
| Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among
| software people that closed source electronic voting
| machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking.
|
| We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you
| question Dominion."
|
| Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at
| the voting machine level is a separate conversation.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Hasn't every other type of computing system been hacked?
| These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords
| on the internet and smart people somehow still believe
| they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on
| the line and ability to shape policy for the most
| powerful economy and military on planet earth but for
| sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're
| openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on
| the internet.
| acdha wrote:
| > Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among
| software people that closed source electronic voting
| machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went
| from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question
| Dominion."
|
| We didn't, you're just grossly over-simplifying a couple
| decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very
| bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain
| paper records or printed receipts which which were never
| validated. That lead to tons of criticism - and better
| designs.
|
| In 2020, nobody said "how dare you question Dominion"
| because the whole point was that we _don't_ trust
| Dominion and use systems which are designed to be
| verifiable and the results had been independently checked
| multiple times.
| ytpete wrote:
| The Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, adding
| important mandates such as a hand-recountable paper trail
| for every electronic voting machine. Concerns predating
| that mandate were a very different beast than the
| unfounded claims one party is making now.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Each side uses the argument most expedient to them at the time.
| For the 2020 election I recall it was concern over mail in
| ballots.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The side that says there's virtually 0 fraud is correct, and
| the other side is living in a fantasy land because they feel
| their party is becoming less and less relevant. That side has
| never produced an iota of proof that there is widespread fraud
| of that it has affected elections in major races, especially
| the presidential one. Sometimes "both sides" works in an
| argument, but when one side has all the proof and the other
| side has only accusations, I comfortably give my allegiance to
| the one that has the proof.
| rightbyte wrote:
| US election process is a joke. Pretending otherwise is some
| sort of gaslighting that could backfire.
|
| If 'one side' break the silent understanding of 'do not
| criticize our complex, convoluted and arcane election
| process', well, bad luck if 'the other side' defends it
| instead of agreeing there is a need to do something about it.
|
| I don't like how about every question becomes some sort of
| thrench warfare around strawman extremes.
| wtcactus wrote:
| I can not bypass the fact that basically no other developed
| country allows citizens to vote without proper official photo
| identification, neither that the sates that allow people to
| vote without any identification, are the ones where the
| Democratic Party always wins elections.
|
| I know correlation doesn't mean causation, but I also know
| that where's there smoke, there's usually a fire.
| efm wrote:
| No one has mentioned 2FA. I suspect the passwords are not all
| that is needed.
| orev wrote:
| I've never seen or heard of 2FA being needed for BIOS access.
| However maybe we could consider "physical presence" as one type
| of factor, which does reduce the risk a lot.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| Also, the article mentioned "partial passwords". I take that
| to mean the BIOS password was two parts, and only one part of
| the password was exposed.
| rsync wrote:
| Paper ballots have very boring failure modes and need no
| explanation or technical support.
|
| When you see a system more complex than paper ballots, know that
| the additions _are not there on your behalf_.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Colorado uses paper ballots. It's an all-mail voting state so
| every voter is mailed a paper ballot which is then dropped off
| or mailed back.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate
| for their expansion will regret it when they see entire
| church memberships filling out their ballots together,
| checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and
| shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate.
|
| There are currently many heads of household voting for their
| entire families, and even aside from mail-in ballots, there
| are people watching and photographing other family members
| voting _within polling places,_ and uploading the photographs
| to social media with parental pride. In many places, this is
| not even criminal anymore.
|
| Paper ballots, with voters having no method to prove who they
| voted for (no-receipt), in a private booth.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| It's been the method of voting in Oregon for 25 years and
| Colorado for 10 years, when does the regret start? The
| current states that have all mail voting are also some of
| the least religious states in the country, you'd think the
| religious states would be pushing for it given the scenario
| you laid out. Colorado also had the second highest voter
| turn out nationwide in 2020 which supports the claim that
| all mail voting is good for increasing access to voting.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Oregon should never be the gold standard for how to do
| anything, ever. Can they even pump their own gas yet?
| jeffmcjunkin wrote:
| Recently, yes :)
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/06/us/oregon-drivers-pump-
| own-fu...
| throw_that_away wrote:
| Before that changed I LOVED turning the attendants away
| as I grabbed my Diesel hose and started pumping. I loved
| telling them when they didn't know.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ron Wyden seems cool.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Of course mailing ballots increases turnout. That wasn't
| the question. The question was how do we determine if the
| votes are fraudulent, for example someone filling out a
| ballot for their elderly parents against their will.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking. My
| signature has changed since I registered to vote here and
| I was notified in one election about it not matching and
| had to cure my ballot. If someone voted under my name, I
| would be notified of the processing of my ballot and
| could object to it. Ease of voting/security is still an
| important balance. I could easily create a 100% secure
| election and it would disenfranchise a lot of voters.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking.
|
| Don't know about Colorado but many other states have been
| sending ballots to dead people as well as people who are
| not resident anymore. The potential for fraud is huge
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| The signature matching would be the first line of defense
| against that. They would also be notified of deaths by
| the department of health and the social security
| administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever
| potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up
| being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is
| caught up front.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-
| gov...
|
| https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/colorado-noncitizens-
| deceas...
| adolph wrote:
| > They would also be notified of deaths by the department
| of health and the social security administration.
|
| Is your claim that the social security administration
| sends a death notification to the deceased person's voter
| registrar?
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/stateagreements.html
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| That is what is stated by the Secretary of State in the
| PBS link above.
|
| "we get information when Coloradans pass away from two
| spots... the Department of Public Health and Environment
| and also the Social Security Administration."
| BostonFern wrote:
| That kind of argument is open to criticism of
| survivorship bias.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Sure maybe and it still never seems to be proven on a
| substantial level. The Heritage foundation has an agenda
| to prove voter fraud and even going by thei number, it
| appears to be a 1 in every million vote level event. Far
| more legal votes are stopped by existing laws than
| illegal votes.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-
| electio...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Signature matching is a notoriously weak verification,
| especially when the risk is within-family
| disenfranchisement. You almost certainly know your
| spouse's and parents' and children's signatures, you
| likely have signed in their name in various occasions
| before, so signing with their signature in a convincing
| enough way to fool a ballot counter who gets to spend
| probably ~10s at most on every mail-in ballot is
| extremely easy.
|
| Not to mention, you can do the opposite: you can destroy
| your "wrong-minded" family member's ballots to prevent
| them from voting.
| tjohns wrote:
| Destroying a ballot accomplishes nothing.
|
| You can always still go vote in person at a polling
| center, even with all-mail voting they always keep a few
| open just in case someone loses or spoils their ballot.
|
| They'll record the vote provisionally just to make sure
| you're not trying to vote twice, and once it's clear no
| mailed-in ballot arrived it gets counted.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| I know my spouses signature and I definitely could not
| copy it for the life of me. I'm sure we could put it
| different safeguards and they would almost certainly
| disenfranchise orders of magnitude more legal votes than
| fraudulent ones given the scale on which we've proven
| voting fraud to happen.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-
| electio...
| dantillberg wrote:
| > ... when they see entire church memberships filling out
| their ballots together ...
|
| Are you able to cite any evidence for this sort of
| conspiracy, or is this mainly conjecture? My search came up
| short. While one can certainly imagine it taking place,
| particularly in smaller groups, I expect there are both
| federal and likely also state laws that would make such
| activities illegal. At the very least, it would seem hard
| to hide at scale.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that ends up in
| news. Are members of the congregation going to snitch on
| their "family"? If it happens it is something you would
| only know from experience.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > [...] when they see entire church memberships filling out
| their ballots together, checking each other to make sure
| they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing
| people who don't participate.
|
| That's a felony isn't it?
| sixothree wrote:
| And tax fraud too?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Couldn't a church just require congregants to send a
| picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?
|
| Is there any basis in reality for this?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Couldn't a church just require congregants to send a
| picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?
|
| They could, though there are some problems with that:
|
| (1) It is generally illegal to ask people to do that,
|
| (2) Voters could "comply" with such a demand and simply
| mark a ballot the way the church wanted, take a picture,
| tell poll workers they had made an error marking their
| ballot and needed a replacement, have the ballot they
| photographed discarded, mark the replacement with their
| honest preferences, and cast that ballot.
|
| Of course, (1) applies to the proposed scenario with
| mail-in ballots, and why large groups that aren't already
| tightly-knit cults where they wouldn't need to worry
| about defectors with secret ballots anyway would do it -
| it only takes on defector to get the whole group busted.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's already illegal to do voter fraud!
| ndiddy wrote:
| I'm not sure how the laws are in all states, but where I
| am it's illegal to use a camera or cell phone within 100
| feet of a voting booth so if you tried to take a picture
| of your ballot, you'd likely get asked to put the camera
| away by a poll worker. This was done with the specific
| intent of protecting the privacy of people's votes.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is addressed in serious voting systems.
|
| In Sweden you _can_ vote by mail, but it has to be done in
| a private booth on a post office. You have to show ID, of
| course.
|
| That means everybody votes secretly, even when voting by
| mail.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sweden doesn't have the same racist history as the United
| States. In the US there's a long history of making it
| very hard to get adequate photo ID or moving or closing
| polling locations in minority districts.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I agree. All those Kamala ads about wives in the polling
| place defying their misogynistic husbands miss the fact
| that those controlling husbands would demand that their
| wives receive mail-in ballots, and then use intimidation
| and pressure to ensure the vote.
|
| The fact that this is rarely discussed probably means that
| it rarely actually happens. Political beliefs between
| husbands and wives are usually quite correlated, I'd
| imagine.
|
| The issue of maliciously voting for you elderly grandparent
| may happen, but is probably very very rare.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| It's nice to hear how effective that ad was at getting
| under people's skin.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who
| advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see
| entire church memberships filling out their ballots
| together, checking each other to make sure they voted
| correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who
| don't participate.
|
| Firing people for not cooperating with something that is a
| crime under both federal and state law is a strategy
| that...doesn't work very long for the criminals.
|
| (Giving a large group of people who you don't trust to vote
| your way that kind of criminal leverage over you _in
| general_ is a pretty self-defeating strategy even without
| the intense incentives produced when you pile termination
| of employment on top of it.)
|
| Also, near-universal mail-in voting isn't some novel
| untested practice. Oregon has been doing it for more than
| two decades, Washington and Colorado for a decade, and even
| more states have adopted it between 2019 and 2022.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| And what a diversity of election results those states
| have had since then!
| mulmen wrote:
| Why would mail in voting create more diverse results?
| States that don't mail ballots also haven't had diverse
| results. These concepts are orthogonal. Mail in voting is
| intended to improve turnout, not diversify results.
| sethammons wrote:
| And now the abuser can just say "show me a picture of your
| ballot" since we all take our phones into the booth. And
| the abuser might stand in line and watch to see if you get
| a second ballot. And you could quickly use photo editing
| software to fake it, but the abuser might run analysis...
|
| Where is the line of accepted risk?
| Robin_Message wrote:
| Photos of ballots are a criminal offence in the UK, which
| obviously is imperfect in an abusive relationship, but
| does help set a general norm that the vote is secret.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Abusive relationships are typically criminal in of
| themselves so not sure laws will help here.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| I disagree. I believe there are people who want results sooner
| rather than later. The greater the delay, the more annoyed
| folks become. Recording votes in _both_ paper and electronic
| form allows for the auditability of paper and the speed of
| electronic calculations.
|
| (Side note: I also believe that hand-counting of ballots can be
| tedious, and humans performing tedious, repetitive tasks are
| prone to error. See [1].)
|
| [1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-
| reports/hand...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Why should you compromise on security because you're
| impatient? Have the voter vote on paper; since it's only two
| candidates, this can be postcard-sized. Scan the postcards
| for the fast results, check and double check by hand (or
| visual if there's a picture taken by the scanner).
| sgerenser wrote:
| There were 22 different races to vote on in my ballot
| yesterday. Are you suggesting only hand count the
| presidential election then tally all the rest digitally?
| goodlinks wrote:
| This is so strange to me.. not complaining or
| criticising, just thanking you for the insight.
|
| I would expect one ballot paper per vote (based on rare
| occasion of doing two at once) to ensure the count is
| simple and accurate.
|
| They make the ballots different colours to ensure you put
| them in the correct boxes iirc
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It wouldn't be a bad idea to break up federal, state and
| local elections into different ballots.
| guiambros wrote:
| 2 candidates for president, yes.
|
| Plus US Senate, federal congressional district, state
| assembly, state Senate, 7 judges, and 6 paragraph-long
| ballot propositions.
|
| Not only your postcard idea wouldn't work, manual counting
| 3 pages (!) of a giant ballot would get prone to errors and
| be expensive rather quickly.
|
| I think the current electronic _plus_ storing the paper
| ballot for future audit if needed offers the best of both
| worlds.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It isn't only two candidates. In my state we have 5
| presidential candidates on the ballot along with 12 other
| local elections and ballot measures.
| herbstein wrote:
| > I believe there are people who want results sooner rather
| than later
|
| In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6
| hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a
| preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary,
| other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we
| have ~30 different things to vote on this election.
|
| So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different?
| Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across
| 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most
| of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from
| corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up
| election.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'm from Sweden where we only have 3 things to vote on
| (national, county, and city). I assumed Denmark was
| similar.
| playingalong wrote:
| Europarlament too?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's on a separate day.
| kec wrote:
| Denmark has a smaller population than New York City,
| America is a very large place.
| riffraff wrote:
| Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out
| the next day. Population does not matter since polling
| stations can be scaled up proportionally.
|
| I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per
| person (referendums) so this would be more than the total
| paper ballots in the US, it works fine.
|
| Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously
| questioned the overall vote results.
| wbl wrote:
| Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a
| state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city
| council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a
| dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper
| surfaces.
| fsh wrote:
| Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically
| large ballots with dozens of options and a very
| complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split
| between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted
| results are generally available by the next morning.
| There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In
| Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it
| cannot be checked by the voters.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Those could easily be prioritized. First count the
| federal elections, then the state elections, then the
| county elections. You get the presidential and
| congressional results within a day, the state election
| results within two-three days, and the more local ones
| within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain
| that it took a week to find out who is on the school
| board?
| will5421 wrote:
| Right, so there are more people to count the vote
| chrisco255 wrote:
| You can scan paper to make the count faster. The benefit of
| using paper is you can even use multiple scanners from
| different companies even.
|
| Hand counts are actually not all that time-consuming for
| large groups. Voting districts are already broken down enough
| whete each polling station only has a few thousand ballots.
| ekianjo wrote:
| US election results take more time that every other paper
| ballot country so this is a lie
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The US tends to combine rather than separate local, state,
| and federal elections, as well as not having a
| parliamentary system at either state or federal level
| (resulting in separate but often simultaneous legislative
| and executive elections, and in some states judicial as
| well), as well as having bicameralism at the federal level
| and most states (resulting in additional simultaneous
| legislative elections), as well as having initiative,
| recall, and/or referenda as significant functions in many
| states, as well as having non-unitary executives with
| multiple independently elected executive officers in many
| states _as well as_ having many of those same state issues
| applying at the county and municipal levels as well (and,
| often, for overlapping additional special jurisdictions.)
|
| As a result, there are a whole lot of _separate_ elections
| conducted on the same ballot in the US, more than is
| typical elsewhere. This increases the tabulation load.
| _def wrote:
| > The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become.
|
| Where's the problem with waiting? This is not some customer
| service to optimize for profit, there's no harm in waiting a
| bit.
| _heimdall wrote:
| People can want it fasted and people can become annoyed, but
| that's their choice. An election can be counted and verified
| only so quickly, it doesn't matter if people want it faster
| or not.
| heisenbit wrote:
| You mean people that had to line up for hours can not wait a
| little longer for results?
|
| Paper ballot have the advantage of being robust against e.g.
| power failures. They are also trivially to scale up - just
| need small secluded space for people to fill them and an
| additional pen - much shorter waiting lines. There is not
| BIOS, there is no software to be rolled out or computer to be
| procured, installed, secured and finally put in secure
| storage or securely disposed.
| stephen_g wrote:
| In my country we have paper ballots, but I have (quite
| seriously) never lined up for more than 20 minutes to vote!
|
| Being a country with compulsory voting helps, because the
| system _has_ to make it possible for everyone without a
| valid exceptional circumstance to be able to vote (would be
| unfair to be fined for not voting if you were still waiting
| in line to vote when the polls closed), and also they can
| quite accurately predict the kind of numbers they 're going
| to get at the polling places.
| mateus1 wrote:
| It does not make sense to paint paper ballots as something that
| is inherently better.. Paper ballots have many potential vector
| attacks many of which are stupidly easy or even unintentional
| (e.g. hanging chads)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Hanging chads were caused by a dumb idea to make ballots
| automatically countable. The solution is to make ballots
| easier to hand-count, by having separate ballot papers for
| each position (or at least the most important ones) and
| counting them by hand.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Hanging chads, which are anyway still a problem introduced by
| machine-counting, not hand counting, are much less
| problematic than hacking a voting machine. There is no tie
| between your vote choice and the probability of a hanging
| chad, so this doesn't bias the election against any
| particular candidate. A hacked voting machine does have
| intentional bias.
| mulmen wrote:
| Strongly disagree. As would any voter who had their vote
| suppressed in Florida in 2000 due to confusing analog voting
| machines, dangling chads, or "partially" filled bubbles.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| Please correct me where I'm mistaken.
|
| * This password list has been public for a long time, and is easy
| to access: hidden excel column on a public spreadsheet.
|
| * BIOS access means the intruder can change boot devices, boot
| their own OS, infect the BIOS with a virus, change boot devices
| back, compromise the vote host OS.
|
| * Keycard security isn't tight security. Any amature physical
| penetration tester would just use a primitive attack on the door
| to get around it. E.g.: Grab the handle from under the door with
| a wire. Youtube has a ton of examples.
|
| * This could have been done months ago, and over a long period of
| time.
|
| * The intruder could clean up logs and any other traces of their
| actions.
|
| Where am I technically wrong here? I'm sure I'm missing something
| obvious. It sounds like what you would do with BIOS passwords if
| you wanted to do something nasty. I haven't seen these questions
| addressed anywhere.
|
| I hear some people say "but we use paper ballots". Then why do
| you have a BIOS password? If it's all paper where does the
| computer fit in? All of this is honest curiosity, I'm not sure
| how the voting system works.
| gruez wrote:
| >I hear some people say "but we use paper ballots". Then why do
| you have a BIOS password? If it's all paper where does the
| computer fit in? All of this is honest curiosity, I'm not sure
| how the voting system works.
|
| Not sure about Colorado specifically, but in many jurisdictions
| voters mark paper ballots, which go into a machine to be
| tabulated, and are finally deposited into a box for safe
| keeping/future recounts.
| quercusa wrote:
| You get to feed the ballot into the (literal) black box
| yourself, it beeps and tells you your vote has been recorded.
| What did it record? Who knows?
| gruez wrote:
| > What did it record? Who knows?
|
| How is it any different than traditional voting, where you
| drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll
| workers would count it correctly?
|
| You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the
| machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct,
| you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well,
| unless your adversary has incredible luck.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Historically, you open the box and count them in front of
| anyone who wants to watch -- using enough polling sites
| that's a relatively short task at each.
|
| Moving ballots, machine counting, etc are all relatively
| modern inventions -- and seem to greatly weaken the
| consensus mechanism for little benefit.
| roenxi wrote:
| In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance
| you know the person who does the counting or can find
| someone in your community who can personally vouch for
| them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew
| several of the tabulators personally and all of them by
| reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city
| these people are somewhat known quantities.
|
| With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a hand
| count it'd be relying on who-knows-who, who-knows-where
| with an uncertain risk profile.
| EGreg wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| You are saying that you just trust some people not to
| manipulate the votes?
|
| Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that
| your vote was included in the total ?
|
| They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually
| distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying.
| That's how elections should be done.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In a hand count you might get the odd bad actor, but
| you're unlikely to get large scale systematic bias, which
| is much easier to introduce in a machine counting system.
| EGreg wrote:
| "the odd bad actor" is incredibly optimistic, almost like
| there is already a bias against ever digitizing or using
| cryptography for adding security to a manual process with
| tons of ways to corrupt an election
|
| Elections around the world do not match this optimistic
| characterization. If they did, we'd all trust the
| outcomes of:
|
| Belarus' election of Lukashenko
|
| Venezuela's election of Maduro
|
| Crimean 2014 referendum
|
| Kosovo's independence referendum
|
| (Note you probably think the last one was a lot more
| reliable than the first three -- a lot of it has to do
| with living in a certain part of the world and believing
| the national media, which is only possible _because_ the
| voting system and results can be so untrustworthy as to
| not allow regular people around the world to check
| anything, so propaganda is given free reign. Science and
| reliable knowledge usually doesn't work this way.)
|
| In fact, let's be clear... the "dictators" WANT the
| elections to have many ways to corrupt them, they
| WOULDN'T want a blockchain or merkle tree, that should
| tell you a lot
|
| And the "war hawks" in countries like USA who oppose
| their geopolitical rivals also want the elections and
| referendums to not be secure and clear, so they can cast
| doubt on them (eg Crimea) while at the same time claiming
| others (like Kosovo) are completely legit and justify
| unprecedented actions .
|
| _As an aside, the vast majority of both Crimea[1] (94%)
| and Kosovo[2] (99%) that turned out to vote in
| referendums in 1991 voted for independence, so we all
| pretty much know what the public wanted later too, but it
| doesn't affect the spin put on the later referendums and
| conflicts anyway_
|
| If elections were secured by cryptography, the People
| around the world would have far more confidence, rather
| than listening to their own media propaganda spin the
| ambiguities, and the wars might even be avoided.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_re
| ferend...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independenc
| e_refe...
| echoangle wrote:
| The advantage of just counting in public and having other
| people vouch is that it is easily understandable by
| everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can
| be convinced that the election was stolen with some
| techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands
| enough cryptography to validate that the election was
| legit?
| prophesi wrote:
| This has me wonder if highschools should start teaching
| the basic concepts of cryptography so that we eventually
| do end up with a common understanding of blockchains,
| password managers, passkeys, or any other technologies
| that we end up using in our day-to-day lives for crucial
| tasks.
| runako wrote:
| > common understanding of blockchains
|
| This is funny because as a CS grad, I cringe about 75% of
| the time when blockchain enthusiasts make pitches that
| are oblivious to the workings of blockchains, the tech
| underneath, and their alternatives.
|
| If the blockchain community can't understand blockchain,
| it's going to be nigh impossible to convey comprehension
| to the general public.
|
| The general public generally just wants the authorities
| whose job it is to manage voting to do so in a competent
| manner. It's worth noting that there's really only been
| one candidate for national election in modern history who
| has called into question the fairness of our elections.
| (And then only when he lost.)
|
| Most of us understand that the folks who work for the
| Secretaries of State are generally doing the best they
| can with the resources we provide, and we don't want to
| provide more resources so they can do a "better" job.
| echoangle wrote:
| It probably wouldn't hurt, but you can't really rely on
| Highschool education for election security. There are
| many people that don't go to Highschool, and those that
| do probably forget half the stuff after a year. For an
| election, you want it to be basically obvious how it
| works in my opinion, anything that takes longer than 5
| minutes to explain makes it easier to create doubt in the
| election.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That wouldn't help for this case. Even a PhD in
| cryptography and computer science doesn't help you in any
| way be convinced that a particular machine is securely
| counting your votes. If you want to be convinced of that,
| you have to audit the code and the hardware specs and the
| network code and everything in between to ensure that the
| system: (a) implements the claimed algorithms, (b) does
| so correctly and free of side-channeled attacks, (c)
| doesn't implement other things that can weaken the
| security after the fact, such as remote code download,
| and (d) has adequate physical protection to prevent
| hardware interference. And probably other things I'm not
| even thinking about.
|
| And all this work doesn't then help you ensure that
| another machine in a different jurisdiction, even one
| that is the same make and model, is also secure. Plus,
| every single person that cares about the vote has to put
| in this work for themselves: you can't "trust the
| experts" when the stakes are so high.
|
| I think this pretty clearly goes beyond what you could do
| teach a high-school setting.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is wrong.
|
| You don't need a Ph D or inspect code to know that your
| vote is included in a Merkle tree.
|
| And you can verify that the vote total matches what is in
| the Merkle tree for your district, and the national
| Merkle tree of districts.
|
| You can also verify that each voter was issued a unique
| token, which went through a mixer.
|
| About the only thing you can't verify is that the agency
| giving out the token hasn't been corrupted and gave a lot
| of voting tokens to fake people, or multiple voting
| tokens. That part (preventing sybil attacks) is why Voter
| ID laws exist throughout the world.
|
| But reducing the attack surface to widespread corruption
| issues involving voter registration, is much better than
| having those AND problets merely counting the ballots by
| hand, as when eg Al Gore lost to George W Bush in 2000.
|
| _The other thing you can't verify is that other people's
| vote wasn't tampered with -- unless THEY report it. Which
| is why the voting system should require voters confirming
| votes from multiple devices that verify your
| cryptographically signed choices, eg vote on a laptop
| then scan QR code from that laptop with your phone and
| approve, just as you would with a web payment request in
| your bank app, crypto wallet or WhatsApp sign-in request.
| Because voting is not as valuable to people as securing
| their bank account, this requirement must be enforced on
| all voters. This way one company eg Google or Apple can't
| spoof the interface._
| tsimionescu wrote:
| So you agree that you can't verify that the system has
| one and only vote tabulated for every person that
| actually voted, or that the vote they intended is the one
| that got counted. So, you agree that you can't trust the
| results of this election.
|
| Furthermore, if you check and find out that your own vote
| was incorrectly counted, you can't actually do anything
| about it, unless voter anonimity is not guaranteed: if
| you can't prove to an outside party what your real vote
| was, you can't pursue any legal action, you just know for
| yourself that the vote was rigged. And if you _can_ prove
| to an outside party what you voted, that opens up a whole
| host of other attacks.
|
| So no, this is not even close to an acceptable solution.
|
| I'll also note that the Bush V Gore election issues were
| not caused by hand counting, but by machine counting as
| well. So, they should be taken as further proof that
| simple ballots and manual counts are the right way to
| conduct an election.
| EGreg wrote:
| No, I said that _reducing the attack surface to a subset
| of the problems you normally have is good and makes
| elections cheaper_. That's what cryptographic protocols,
| including blockchain, do in general. They replace the
| need to trust corruptible middlemen, with a protocol that
| is infeasible or extremely hard to subvert, and which
| leaves traces of the subversion. Crypto is used all the
| time such as when you use cryptographic hashes to detect
| tampering, or merkle proofs to prove something was
| included correctly in a larger part.
|
| You then replied essentially: "well since you still have
| some problems, you can't trust the election... the paper
| way is the only right way".
|
| Some people might be wilfully misunderstanding because
| it's "cool to rag on blockchain" or whatever. People who
| always repeat a refrain like "this is simply _the only
| right way to do things_ " are trying to convince not by
| arguments but by pushing a dogma. And most skeptics of
| technologies have been wrong, including skeptics of
| airplanes, computers, etc.
|
| Estonia for example is already doing secure elections
| online for years, explain that https://e-estonia.com/how-
| did-estonia-carry-out-the-worlds-f...
|
| The _hand recount_ took too long and the Supreme Court
| stepped in and "just picked a winner". Which later counts
| showed to have been the wrong result. Citing the machine
| counting alongside it doesnt really help your case
| because the machine counting was all kinds of ad-hoc and
| hybrid things (including the dreaded silly "butterfly
| ballots") which is exactly what people advocate for, when
| they try to argue for avoiding a fully consistent and
| uniform electronic system. They _want_ all the little
| variations and manual counting "so no one can hack the
| whole thing". So yes it's a _perfectly valid argument_ to
| point out that delays caused by this led to the wrong
| outcome (and had consequences like ignoring Bin Laden,
| allowing 9 /11, the invasion of Iraq, clamping down on
| civil liberties in USA, raiding Social Security etc.)
|
| All the problems you cited above are present in the
| current system -- including having to prove how you voted
| to challenge the results. Except in the current system
| there are _far more_ problems, including not even being
| able to physically show up at the polling place (because
| it is too far), or proving that the poll workers
| corrupted your vote, added extra ballots, literally
| anything. Out of sight out of mind I guess.
|
| And across the world, elections are done even worse.
| Consider the recent election of Lukashenko in Belarus.
| People in districts where he got 80% were trying to ask
| around who voted for him and complained that very few had
| said they did. It's all arguments based on hearsay. That
| is the flip side of not being able to _prove_ how you
| voted. In fact if they wanted to know how you voted, in
| your manual system, they could just take a camera outside
| the booth and look at timing to know when you voted. Or
| just put a camera in the booth. But in fact it's far
| worse than that, the voter databases include driver's
| licenses and addresses and social security numbers, in
| most US states, AND party affiliation is 94% correlated
| to how you vote so all this paper ballot "security
| theater" to prevent "being ABLE to prove how you voted"
| gets you nowhere:
| https://ballotpedia.org/Availability_of_state_voter_files
|
| And oh yeah... in the system I described you can
| _anonymously challenge_ the results because you have
| cryptographic signatures but your own private key came
| out of a mixer, so you don't need to identify yourself to
| _prove_ your vote didnt match what's in the system.
| Enough complaints and we ALL know which districts were
| corrupt, and very quickly.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In paper based systems, you and other volunteers do most
| of the counting, alongside representatives of all
| parties. None of the problems I described exist in such a
| system: you can't add a million votes unless you convince
| a whole lot of volunteers and representatives of the
| parties that they are real votes. You can't put multiple
| votes in unless none of those same people see you. If one
| volunteer attempts to change a vote, another one will
| stop them. If you think your vote was miscounted, a re-
| count can be issued, with even more observers, and the
| exact same artifacts are available for all to see (how do
| you fix an error in the Merkle tree, even if everyone
| agrees it happened?). Even if you have an extremely
| corrupt county, that doesn't generally matter in the
| grand scheme of things; and its extremely unlikely, as
| any citizen in that county can stop the corruption by
| simply participating in the process themselves.
|
| Wide-scale voter fraud of this kind is simply impossible
| in a paper system. The only times it happens is like in
| Belarus, where it's not "an election", it's a public show
| that looks like an election, but where the result is pre-
| determined. The Merkle tree would show the same thing
| there: it's a mock election to make it look like a mock
| democracy. Lukashenko wouldn't have stopped leading the
| country even if miraculously the election would have
| shown he lost. Or, it can happen in other more complex
| and more discoverable ways, such as busing voters around
| to physically vote multiple times in multiple (preferably
| far away) polling places.
|
| As for Estonia, they'll come to regret this system sooner
| or later. It can work for a while, but there is no doubt
| that the system will get hacked, or the losing party will
| be able to convince enough people that it got hacked even
| if it didn't. Someone will accidentally publish private
| keys, like in this Colorado case. The system will go down
| on election day because of a bug. Who knows which one
| will be first, but it'll end their experiment. The rest
| of the world will continue with paper voting and not face
| such problems.
| EGreg wrote:
| "In paper based systems, you and other volunteers"
|
| No, 99.99% of "you" go home and "trust the system" to
| some poll workers, many with major bias and incentives.
| Many of "you" don't turn out to vote or are
| disenfranchised by simply living too far from the polling
| place or not being able to take time off work, when you
| could have just voted from your app.
|
| Certain parties even _rely_ on suppressing turnout. (Can
| you guess which party does that in USA? Hint: it's the
| one that closed 1600 polling stations right after the
| Voting Rights Act got neutered, and then got mad about
| mail-in ballots ruining their carefully laid
| disenfranchisement plans during the pandemic.).
|
| In fact, if you want the election to be "secured by
| multiple distrusting parties", that is _exactly_ what
| byzantine-fault-tolerant cryptographic protocols (which
| power many blockchains) are designed to do.
|
| _(how do you fix an error in the Merkle tree, even if
| everyone agrees it happened?). Even if you have an
| extremely corrupt county, that doesn 't generally matter
| in the grand scheme of things; and its extremely
| unlikely, as any citizen in that county can stop the
| corruption by simply participating in the process
| themselves._
|
| You are literally arguing from a double standard. In a
| paper election, somehow "any citizen" by themselves can
| stop the corruption... by simply participating in the
| process." Yeah sure one guy exposes the entire corrupt
| county, with no ability to prove how anyone voted, why
| didn't a single Belarussian and Venezuelan think of that?
| LOL" And on the other hand, when you have tons of
| anonymous irrefutable proofs by participants submitted
| publicly, you throw up your hands and say "what can we do
| to fix the merkle tree, even if we all knew it was
| corrupt?" The point of the trre is to catch errors, prove
| them and publish the proofs widely. As a society, you
| then have the proof nexessary to fix errors the same way
| you'd normally do it -- by identifying the corrupt
| districts, and having a recount or revote just there. And
| bringing those responsible for tampering to justice.
|
| If you stop conflating all the things and unpack them,
| you'll see that adding cryptography makes things strictly
| better:
|
| 1. You have more chances to catch if there have been
| extra votes cast because the private keys are coming from
| tokens handed out at registration. In a paper election
| you might have corruption at registration AND all manner
| of ballot stuffing later too.
|
| 2. Everyone can check their vote and report a
| discrepancy. Not just the volunteers at the polling
| places. And all because they can prove how they voted and
| do it anonymously!
|
| 3. Everyone can see exactly which districts are corrupt
| in giving out fake voter registrations, and where there's
| smoke, there's fire. They can do an audit and guess what,
| the cryptographic signatures are helpful for creating a
| PROVABLE trail that implicates the system.
|
| 4. The attack surface reduces to pretty much just the
| voter registration sybil attacks. Eliminating a whole
| class of problems on actual election day.
|
| 5. The results are reported to everyone reliably and
| quickly, or even in real-time (though the latter is "too
| good" because it might affect how later voters vote).
|
| There's practically not a single problem that adding
| cryptography creates, which wasn't already present in the
| paper system. And you know all this because if you
| honestly asked yourself whether dictators, who want sham
| elections, would want to do their next election with
| cryptographic signatures and merkle trees or not -- what
| would be your answer? Be honest. And think about what
| that means for your argument.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there are more than 20,000 polling
| workers in the USA, so no, it's not 99.9% who go home and
| trust. And most importantly, for every republican there
| is a democrat and vice versa, in every polling place,
| auditing the process in real time.
|
| And the reason you can fix this at the polling station
| level is simple: as long as the entire state is not
| captured by a single party (in which case no real
| elections are happening), the rest of the state can come
| in and fix the bad locations.
|
| Related to your points:
|
| 1. If there are more ballots than registered voters, this
| is easy to check. It's even better than a private key
| system, as extra registrations can also be caught on the
| day of polling, if people actually come in and vote
| again, whereas extra private keys being handed out will
| not see an election official again.
|
| 2. There is no way to actually "prove anonymously how you
| voted". To move the needle in any way, you have to come
| out personally and say "I know I voted like this, but the
| system shows me as voting like that, here is what it
| shows when I present my private key". And either way,
| this is actually a weakness of the system, as it allows
| trustworthy vote selling.
|
| 3. I don't understand how this is supposed to be any
| easier than in the current system. You still won't know
| how many people were legally allowed to be registered in
| that district, so what are you comparing against?
|
| 4. No, the threat surface is the entire electronic
| system. Someone can attack the system and prevent voters
| from getting private keys, issue corrupted keys, allow
| more keys than were registered, present the results
| differently from what is stored in the merkle tree, use
| side channels to decrypt private keys, exfiltrate data
| about individual voters, and who knows how many other
| ways. Plus, if you can vote from anywhere, you can be
| coerced, especially by family or caretakers, to vote in
| their presence, or disclose your private key so they can
| vote in your name themselves.
|
| And all this assumes the system is an actually secure
| Merkle tree. In reality, it would just be a computer
| program that takes your vote and shows you some data.
| What is actually running on the server is impossible for
| you to know unless you are given access to the hardware
| and software.
|
| 5. Sure, this is a clear advantage.
|
| You are severely underestimating the risks of an
| electronic system, and only looking at the purely
| theoretical logical core. All of the systems around it,
| through which you interact with the core system, and all
| of the human factors around using the systems, are a huge
| attack surface. For example, would you trust this system
| and issue your vote from a phone or PC which you know is
| infested with malware? If not, then you have to agree
| that every device is part of the attack surface of this
| system.
|
| Finally, in relation to your challenge, elections held by
| dictators are only meant to look like elections in more
| legitimate countries. So, if most countries hold paper
| elections (which is by far the majority), then the
| dictators will put on a show like that. If the majority
| of countries used electronic voting, dictators would also
| get electronic voting machines. Still, I don't know of
| any dictator that bothers to make a show of how free and
| correct are their elections.
| EGreg wrote:
| Thank you for engaging point by point. Let's look:
|
| 1) Easy to check by whom? With paper, it's a bunch of
| people yelling to the news they saw discrepancies. In
| USA, we have probably the most expensive election in the
| world and we heard it all in 2020 from sour Republicans.
| To this day many people believe the election wasn't
| secure and was "stolen", including with physical ballots
| being shipped in, etc. On the one hand you have people
| yelling and on the other side you have people saying it's
| all fine. Just like after a Venezuela or Belorussia
| election or the Crimea referendum. None of that would be
| the case if the elections could just have a standard way
| to be run, same as we now have electronic standards for
| DNSSEC or certificate PKI the EVM or IEEE standards. We
| can do things at scale _because_ of standards. We could
| remove most of the uncertainty.
|
| 2) You don't have to come out and reveal your PII, in
| order to publish a complaint as a voter. You'd just have
| to reveal that you know the private key, here is your
| receipt signed by the vendors in the system, and here is
| the actual result the UX vendors reported. The reputation
| of the vendor would be PROVABLY destroyed, all those
| receipts would be entered as evidence and they'd have to
| pay reparations in lawsuits. All because people were
| forced to double-check from 2 devices. The UX vendor
| would face chilling effects far larger than currently,
| for tampering with an election. None of this requires PII
| of the claimants.
|
| 3 and 4. You say it's the whole system but proceed to
| list only things related to registration. Which, I
| already said, remains an issue, but the actual voting can
| be done on a phone. All your concerns could be also done
| with a banking app etc. where far more money is at stake
| than a single vote, yet people use them all the time.
|
| I am not sure how you are supposed to impersonate a
| person unless you steal their phone, and then force them
| to open the voting app and enter their biometrics, just
| for a lousy vote -- and you'd have to do this all across
| town at scale? Nan.
|
| If you're saying that a bank can "roll back a
| transaction" if you report losing your app, and somehow
| the election reaching finality (like a blockchain
| transaction) is a negative, then you're saying that
|
| As for people losing their private keys or phones or
| maybe so poor they can't afford to have a computer or
| whatever, they can register to vote in person. If they
| failed to update their registration, though, before the
| election, and they can't vote from their phone, it's the
| same issue as if they didnt register at all. So they
| didn't vote. But on net there is a much bigger turnout.
|
| 5. Okay we agree here. And this isnt an academic point --
| Al Gore would have been president if they could have
| counted the votes faster, we could have probably avoided
| the entire Middle East being on fire, the rollback of US
| civil liberties, maybe even prevented 9/11 with NORAD,
| and finally could have avoided the current disastrous
| wars in Ukraine etc. since Bush was the one to push them
| into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly
| opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with
| Yuschenko to do it anyway
| (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-
| says-n... and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine)
|
| I think we both know that a corrupt government would not
| want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish
| them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they'd
| have no way to fudge the results reliably. By making
| decision-making cheap, the public in every country would
| be welcomed to hold regular referendums on topics (like
| California Proposition XYZ) and the governments would be
| MORE accountable to the people. (Personally, I think
| provably random polling is superior to voting, due to
| turnout issues, but that's another story).
|
| You can say whatever you like but when the rubber meets
| the road, corrupt officials and their detractors overseas
| (the war hawks looking to cast doubt on any way to figure
| out what, say, the actual people of Crimea or Donetsk
| want) both prefer paper ballots and the effective
| inability to cast absentee ballots when you fled the
| country or were internally displaced. While
| cryptocurrency allows you to take your money with you
| while fleeing a war zone, the crypto-voting would let you
| vote from anywhere as long as you had registered as a
| citizen back before being displaced etc.
|
| It's literally technology you can _add to secure things_
| and corrupt governments avoid it, war hawks across the
| world hipe they don't use it, and you are arguing that
| even _adding it_ makes things less secure and less
| reliable.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _Since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in
| 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO
| membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do
| it anyway._
|
| Except he did not "push them into NATO in 2008". 2008 was
| the year that Ukraine's membership application was
| formally _rejected by NATO_ , and there it has sat, in
| the doghouse, ever since. But Putin invaded anyway,
| because the NATO noise was never the reason he invaded in
| the first place.
|
| The most significant consequence of the Bush presidency
| was probably the criminally insane invasion of Iraq --
| which arguably _did_ encourage Putin to go into Ukraine,
| on equally vacuous and fraudulent pretexts. "If they can
| get away with it, then why can't I?" was apparently his
| thinking.
| EGreg wrote:
| NATO member countries didn't really want Ukraine,
| Ukrainian citizens really didn't want NATO, but in 2008
| Bush vowed to press for both Ukraine and Georgia to join
| NATO.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bush-to-press-for-
| ukra...
|
| Saakashvili of Georgia (who is now in jail for
| corruption) also had two breakaway republics at the time
| -- Ossetia and Abhazia -- and he engaged in a war with
| them and kept hoping NATO would come. Back then Putin
| wasn't even president, it was Medvedev. Anyway, the same
| exact war started happening back then, with Russia
| invading Georgia with tanks moving slowly to the capitol,
| Tbilisi. Their goal was to intimidate them into agreeing
| to stop shelling the two breakaway republics and leave
| them alone. (Georgia and Armenia, in turn, had been
| protected by Russia from Ottomans, much the same way).
|
| The difference in that war was that it ended in a week,
| because Nicolas Sarkozy (the French president) negotiated
| a peace agreement successfully. Since then Russia hasn't
| invaded Georgia further, simply protected Abhazia and
| Ossetia, in fact Georgia has been normalizing relations
| with Russia and opened up direct flights and tourism last
| year etc. A great outcome for all civilians, compared to
| what could have been a senseless war. I was in Georgia
| last year and saw it firsthand.
|
| Meanwhile, after the regime change revolution in Ukraine
| in 2014, the CIA had 8 years to build up weapons and
| paramilitaries etc. Same exact playbooj that ravaged
| Afghanistan w the mujahideen (Arabic for "jihadists") and
| Afghan Arabs, masterminded by Zbignew Brezhinski. This
| time it was CIA in Ukraine: https://news.yahoo.com/cia-
| trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...
|
| So in 2022 when Russians tried the same playbook
| (intimidate Kyiv into not shelling the two breakway
| republics) they didn't expect the Ukrainians to walk away
| from the negotiating table. They waited for them in
| Belarus under Lukashenko (where they had signed the Minsk
| accords years earlier, endorsed unanimously by the UN
| security council) but the Ukrainian negotiators kept
| delaying and venue shopping, and the SBU (Ukrainian KGB)
| even killed one of them as "a traitor" for being too
| eager to negotiate, a man appointed by the President
| himsdlf and who the Ukrainian state department called "a
| hero".
|
| I personally spoke to David Arakhamia (the guy w the hat)
| on Facebook Messenger in the first days of the war, he
| had many Ukrainians on his FB wall begging him to make a
| deal and avert the war. I tool screenshots and the
| pleading posts are still there. He privately told me he
| agreed w me. But when the negotiators entered the room
| they left after 2 hours. We don't kmow what happens in
| closed rooms -- whether Baker promised "not an inch" to
| Gorbachev, or whether the Ukrainian or Russian
| negotiators ever negotiated in good faith. But the
| civilians, the people deserve better representation. The
| war continued, and the tanks found themselves around Kyiv
| and major firefights in Bucha vs Azov and other armed
| groups with RPGs shooting at tanks. Kind of like the red
| triangle videos of Hamas vs Israeli tanks. It's really
| unfortunate and was avoidable. Russia expected it to go
| like the last war, it didn't.
|
| Naftali Bennett was the Israeli PM and he could have
| played the role of Nicolas Sarkozy did with Medvedev
| (Russia) and Saakashvili (Georgia). He has a tell-all
| interview in Hebrew about how he had negotiated peace
| DIRECTLY between Putin and Zelensky, and had them both
| make major concessions -- eg Ukraine wouldn't join NATO,
| and Putin promised not to kill Zelensky. In his interview
| he said that Zelensky double-checked this and then came
| out to record his famous video "I am not afraid, I am
| here" and saying he needs ammunition, not a ride.
|
| Why did Bennett not succeed? He said he "coordinated
| everything to the smallest detail" with the US and UK, he
| "doesn't do as he pleases", and they told him he MUST
| stop the peace deal. He said he "thought they were wrong"
| and still does. That peace is worth a shot. But he didn't
| continue, and the war didnt stop 2 weeks into it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs
|
| Erdogan luckilh WAS able to negotiate a year-long grain
| export deal in the midst of a war, which likely saved
| millions of lives -- Yemen had been very dependent on
| Ukrainian grain and had a famine from yet ANOTHER proxy
| war (this one between Iran and Saudis w US weapons, same
| kind of war but with roles reversed). But no one seemed
| to care about Yemenis, despite millions being in far more
| dire hunger conditions than Ukrainians ever were.
|
| The world is complex, but Bush had started the stupid
| push into NATO, even as NATO members were slowwalking
| him. My guess is he was angry at Putin's Munich speech in
| 2007 NATO, calling out USA for invading Iraq and
| violating international law. Back in 2001 Putin was the
| first president after 9/11 to call Bush and offer
| condolences and they made a joint anti-terrorism
| initiative. Putin wanted to join NATO back in 2001, he
| asked the NATO heads but was always rejected. Since
| 2002(!) Russia tried to stop the invasion of Iraq in the
| security council and every other way it could but Bush
| couldn't be stopped. That is when I think Russia realized
| that after Kosovo and Iraq, that NATO isnt purely
| defensive and USA isnt going to be constrained by
| international law. Putin's speech in 2007 made Bush want
| to flip Russia's neighbors (about which every ambassador
| said it was a red line for anyone in Russia, "not just
| Putin") so the result was predetermined:
|
| https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-
| of-w...
|
| As for why Bush did it -- I will let Bush say it in his
| own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTX5uvZWu3Q
| aguaviva wrote:
| Right - Bush "pressed for" Ukraine's membership, but _he
| wasn 't successful_. And in fact Putin had executed (what
| he should have seen as) a successful containment strategy
| by that date, via purely diplomatic means. Sanity
| prevailed, reason prevailed -- but Putin invaded anyway.
| That's the key takeaway here.
|
| As to the other tangents, briefly:
|
| (1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact
| war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what
| should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In
| particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with)
| Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his
| attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically
| a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer
| territory).
|
| The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also
| entirely different; the violent aspects of these
| conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th
| century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after
| the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities
| inflicted by both sides).
|
| There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the
| situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is
| attempting to annex - which never saw _any_ violent
| separatist conflict prior to Putin 's invasion via proxy
| forces in 2014.
|
| In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions
| between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same
| exact war" is really quite silly.
|
| (2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians
| could have just walked away by making basically symbolic
| concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all
| would have been well; and that we just don't really know
| happened because it was all behind closed doors.
|
| This is a false characterization. By now we do have a
| pretty good idea of what happened, because the
| proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly
| investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article
| linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the
| concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely
| symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but
| drastic reductions in force that would have effectively
| left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any
| kind. Against this backdrop there were also the
| atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and
| Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain
| chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on
| Russia's good word for their security would not be in
| their best interest.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812302
|
| (3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's
| paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just
| scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all
| bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after
| that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of
| story.
| cvwright wrote:
| I _have_ a PhD in CS, with peer reviewed publications on
| using cryptography, and all I learned in my studies is
| that it's practically impossible to build a secure voting
| machine.
|
| I even took a class from a professor who regularly
| testified to congress on the topic.
|
| Paper ballots all the way.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| In this day and age the counting should at least be live
| streamed. Almost every big box store in the US already
| has a self checkout area that's almost equipped for this
| task (it has the hardware and the software, just not the
| physical layout). Publicly (like a public park, not like
| a "public" school) verifiable vote counting shouldn't be
| a hard problem.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Doesn't the Blockchain, by design, record what is entered
| into it? So couldn't someone then figure out how you
| voted?
| Groxx wrote:
| (without making any claim about "block chains for voting
| are good/bad")
|
| Not really. Generally if you want to privately check
| something like this, you encrypt it for the recipient
| (government), and sign it with something that only you
| know. So the contents are hidden from everyone and nobody
| knows anyone's signature, but _you_ can prove that _your_
| item is in the list, unmodified, and is therefore
| counted.
|
| And then the chain would provide a quick way to check for
| "has not been modified since I checked", without needing
| to do the full check again.
| jasomill wrote:
| Assuming uncontrolled public access to the blockchain,
| couldn't this also be used to prove _to others_ that you
| voted "correctly", facilitating vote buying schemes?
| Groxx wrote:
| Particularly if you do not publicly disclose the cert you
| signed it with: I'd be willing to bet there's some way to
| make it so you can produce a signing cert that'll claim
| you filled in any data you wish.
|
| E.g. have your signature data be a class of values based
| on vote possibilities, but have all produce the same
| final signature. You could produce anything for anyone
| that way. I'm not sure if that'd be "forward secrecy" or
| "deniable encryption" or what, but there are a variety of
| systems that do similar things.
|
| I am not a cryptographer and I don't know any concrete
| implementations that would have all the properties I
| want, but _pieces_ of pretty much all things you could
| reasonably want in a voting system do already exist. And
| pretty often they can be layered together. The bigger
| problems in practice seem to be "people won't trust it"
| (which is defensible), "some of the fancier crypto is too
| new and not thoroughly proven" (which is very true, e.g.
| zero-knowledge proofs), and "implementers so far have
| been stunningly incompetent" (undeniable).
|
| (edit: or I guess more easily, just sign the data after
| encryption, and throw away your encryption key. then you
| can claim whatever you like - it's encrypted, they can't
| know, and you can still show that it wasn't changed)
| inlined wrote:
| Traditionally, you would sign with the government's
| public key so that only they can decrypt it. But ballots
| are so low entropy that I'd be worried about brute
| forcing it (maybe some significant nonces can be added?)
| a solution where you use the block chain signed with
| certificates held in a central database is just...
| another case of people pushing blockchain without
| understanding it
| fulladder wrote:
| Nah, not a problem. You generate a random number R and
| encrypt R || V where V is your vote.
|
| (Or, equivalently, use something like CBC mode with a
| random i.v.)
| roenxi wrote:
| That seems like it'd be impossible to implement. Either
| I'd have a record that I voted with no way to confirm who
| my vote was counted for, or I'd be able to prove that I
| voted for a specific candidate which opens a Pandora's
| box of problems (either coercion for voting for the wrong
| candidate or bribes for provably voting for a specific
| candidate).
|
| I mean sure, if someone can come up with a workable
| blockchain-based system that would be good, but I don't
| think that is an in-practice option on the table right
| now.
| EGreg wrote:
| First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify
| stuff without being able to prove it to others
|
| But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to
| prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown. The
| same people who say you don't need an ID to vote because
| it's a non-issue then come up with fantasy scenarios of
| masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or
| bribed to do it LOL.
| runako wrote:
| > masses of people being forced to prove how they voted,
| or bribed to do it LOL
|
| Would you believe that in some households, the husband
| considers his wife's vote as his property? And that there
| are lots of households like this?
|
| It doesn't have to be a singular mass of people being
| coerced by a single entity. Lots of wives being coerced
| by lots of husbands is also corrosive to elections.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I don't know if there's a lot of bribery risk, but a
| family member asking to see how you voted has plenty of
| room for coercion and abuse. It seems good that no one
| but you can know how you voted in principle.
| mulmen wrote:
| > But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to
| prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.
|
| Well you're wrong.
| EGreg wrote:
| Okay. People wrong about not needing voter ID.
|
| Simple. They're wrong.
| mulmen wrote:
| People who want voter ID are wrong because they ignore
| the racist history of using voter ID requirements to
| disenfranchise voters and/or don't understand how voter
| registration or ballot tracking work.
|
| Voter ID is simply not something that will add security
| to the voting process but it _will_ disenfranchise
| voters.
|
| ID is already verified when registering and names are
| recorded when submitting ballots. Anyone seeking to cast
| ballots in the name of registered non-voters would need
| an army of individuals that won't be recognized by poll
| workers and perfect knowledge of who is registered and
| not voting.
|
| If a single registered voter name tries to cast two
| ballots that will trigger an investigation that will
| unravel the conspiracy. It doesn't scale. It's a problem
| made up by people who want to disenfranchise voters and
| is eaten up because it sounds "common sense".
|
| People who don't think anonymity in voting is important
| lack imagination and historical knowledge. Fear of
| retaliation from the government, political fanatics, your
| family, or friends is perfectly rational and is why
| voting must be anonymous. This is an especially
| reasonable concern in an election where one of the
| candidates refers to voters as "the enemy within".
| Consider voting for a Communist when Senator McCarthy was
| on his witch hunts. People are right to be scared of
| retaliation.
| EGreg wrote:
| Tons of other countries require voter ID. You could say
| they're all just being racist or whatever. But that
| wasn't my point.
|
| My point was -- when it comes to challenging things you
| agree with, you write long explanations with nuance.
|
| But when it's things you disagree with, you say they're
| "simply wrong". That's what I was getting at.
|
| You need to have a consistent standard for discussion,
| and clearly the latter approach isn't very helpful or
| productive.
| mulmen wrote:
| I'm not calling voter ID racist. I'm saying that _in the
| United States_ it has an established history of being
| abused by racists to suppress minority votes. This is a
| verifiable fact. Look at the Voting Rights Act for proof.
|
| > You need to have a consistent standard for discussion,
| and clearly the latter approach isn't very helpful or
| productive.
|
| And yet you just did what you accuse me of.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes I did it after you to mimic you and prove a point
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It is absolutely 100% not overblown. Voter punishment and
| suppression is a well established practice in many
| places. India's vote tallies for example have evolved to
| a pretty complicated system, because local powers were
| even instituting collective punishment on whole villages
| if they voted "badly". So, the vote counting system had
| to be adjusted to extend vote secrecy not just to the
| personal vote, but even to entire counties.
|
| This is a very real problem with a well known history.
| Even in the USA, gerrymandering is facilitated by this
| kind of information. If votes were mixed during counting
| so that you didn't have information about vote counts in
| each polling place, it would have been considerably
| harder to come up with the crazy districts being used
| today in many places. Having personal identification of
| each voter would definitely have creative uses as well.
|
| And as for bribing, in this very election we have Elon
| Musk publicly announcing he's giving out money to people
| who essentially pledge to vote (with some attempts at
| plausible deniability for committing this federal crime).
| I'm sure smaller and less loud election influencing is
| being attempted all the time - but it's hard to do if
| people can outright scam you and vote differently than
| what you paid them. Having an online proof of your vote
| would open up the floodgates to this at a massive scale.
| And there are plenty of people poor enough to see this as
| a lifeline.
| roenxi wrote:
| > First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify
| stuff without being able to prove it to others
|
| I doubt it, and I suspect if you try to point at a
| specific system to implement you will find that that none
| exist even in theory. I can verify I _voted_ with zero
| knowledge, yes. But I can 't verify _who I voted for_. So
| I can put candidate A into the machine, it switches to
| candidate B and we can all prove I voted in the election.
|
| Conversely, if I can prove who I voted for then the
| scheme is vulnerable to the well known after-election
| issues because I can prove it to others. If I can only
| prove something with plausible deniability note that I
| probably can't tell if the machine switched my vote
| around. There might be something that can be done in the
| space, but it is a tricky one to resolve.
|
| > But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to
| prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.
|
| If you check you may well find it in a reasonable-worse-
| case scenario it is a matter of life-and-death. I think
| maybe literally zero government electoral systems make
| the voter's vote public (ie, we have near universal
| secret ballots [0])? There is a reason for that. If we
| wanted people to sign their name on the vote slip that'd
| be great for auditing - but we don't because that would
| set the system up for some really horrible failures. The
| one that leaps to mind is "if you don't vote for me and I
| get in, I will do [insert blank] to you" strategies.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot#Chronolog
| y_of_in...
| EGreg wrote:
| "Literally zero make the voter's vote public"
|
| In most US states I can get a voter's database and "party
| affiliation". I was shocked that thus info is publicly
| available, and all the people's addresses and driver's
| license info are also stored there (and can be leaked)
|
| And make no mistake, these databases are regularly leaked
| / hacked: https://qbix.com/blog/2023/06/12/no-way-to-
| prevent-this-says...
|
| In fact there is a law for states to create and maintain
| this information.
| https://ballotpedia.org/Availability_of_state_voter_files
|
| The "party affiliation" is a _very_ good (around 95%)
| proxy to how they're going to vote when they show up, as
| long as the two-party system dominates, which is why I
| say the whole "ability to prove your vote" thing is
| overblown, since your party affiliation at registration
| is already known, even _publicly_ :
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-
| patte...
|
| Explain how Estonia is able to reliably and securely do
| online elections, if only paper elections are secure:
|
| https://e-estonia.com/how-did-estonia-carry-out-the-
| worlds-f...
|
| Many times, people claim that technology would never be
| able to do a good job at what humans do manually -- and
| almost always this has been proven wrong after a while:
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-
| block...
| sethammons wrote:
| If everyone got a unique prime number and a running total
| vote product was available, I always thought this would
| be a neat solution. Still susceptible to the goon-with-a-
| wrench technique I think
| EGreg wrote:
| BLS signatures can provide similar properties
|
| Crypto (by which I always mean cryptography) can help
| secure a lot of things that normally are just "trust in a
| middleman"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29306829
| tedunangst wrote:
| What do you do when you know the vote counter and don't
| trust them?
| roenxi wrote:
| What do you do when you live in North Korea and are
| worried about an elections integrity? At some point the
| answer is you survive as best you can.
|
| But to fight corruption you need more transparency and to
| increase the costs of conspiracies, ie, to head in the
| opposite direction of voting machines.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved
| and can be recounted by hand.
|
| I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are
| recounted at least twice, by different people.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| The issue in the US is compounded further as running
| elections is left up to not only the states, but the
| individual municipalities in those states and typically
| run at the county level.
|
| Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification
| is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail
| vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the
| ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but
| Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are
| thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in
| use for the current election.
|
| When viewing this at a macro level for electing the
| office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to
| pull off wide scale fraud.
|
| Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are
| forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by
| people with opposing ideologies
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| On the flip side: it makes it incredibly difficult to
| notice you were a subject of a wide scale fraud.
|
| You need to know an every single system and you can't
| look for discrepancies what would be obvious in the
| environment with a standardised system.
| pstrateman wrote:
| Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are
| decided by 10k votes.
| Retric wrote:
| The point of voting is to kick people out of power when
| they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the system
| honest.
|
| As such getting the count absolutely correct isn't
| necessarily as important vs more systemic biases like
| gerrymandering or voter suppression. The vote may be
| rigged before people started casting ballots, but that
| doesn't make voting useless. It's the strongest signals
| that are most important and that's still preserved.
| w4 wrote:
| > _The point of voting is to kick people out of power
| when they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the
| system honest._
|
| This is also a good argument in favor of decentralized
| voting management, as much of a shitshow as it may be.
| Centralizing the management of voting under the authority
| of the people voting intends to kick out of power is
| potentially self-defeating.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| > getting the count absolutely correct isn't necessarily
| as important vs more systemic biases
|
| History lesson: The 2004 Washington state governor's
| election was decided by a mere 129 votes, and only after
| multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon
| boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks
| following election day kept altering the totals and
| overturned the original result. The election was
| extremely controversial and not decided until two days
| before Christmas. Due to these irregularities, many
| people did not accept the results for years afterward.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatori
| al_...
|
| Even more bizarre, the election closely shadowed the plot
| of the movie Black Sheep, which was released 8 years
| before.
| gruez wrote:
| >and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly
| "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted
| ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering
| the totals and overturned the original result.
|
| The explanations given in the wikipedia article seem
| pretty plausible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatori
| al_...
|
| I don't see how it's any different what happened in the
| 2020 election, where Trump appeared to win at first, but
| a bunch of mail-in ballots (which were counted later)
| turned it around. While I can see why it might seem
| superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if
| the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to
| get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _While I can see why it might seem superficially
| suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of
| mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed
| /incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side._
|
| God help us that Pennsylvania mandates mail-in ballots
| can only start being counted on election day.
| _heimdall wrote:
| At that point it doesn't matter whether the voting system
| is centralized or left up to localities. If the election
| comes down to a few thousand key votes in one or a few
| localities you are left with a very small number of
| election systems to keep a close eye on whether that's
| the central one or a few local ones.
|
| Its also worth noting that just because the central
| government could run one standardized election process
| doesn't mean that the election is easier to secure.
| Ultimately polling places would still be local. Maybe it
| helps a bit if everyone uses the same system, but that's
| more about consistency than security.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| If you know _exactly_ which 10k votes you need to
| compromise, it would be easier to just campaign there.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Not if you have no hope of actually changing their vote.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Which 10k votes?
|
| How are you going to have 5 digit numbers of fraudulent
| voter registrations ready to deploy in all of the
| critical areas, but also ready to enjoy intense public
| scrutiny before and after the election. Voter
| registration databases are public, more or less, so you
| need to figure out how to fool the people running the
| election as well as the third party watchers,
| statisticians, academics, journalists and the veritable
| army of people who could have their entire career made by
| uncovering fraud.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Aside from national referendums every few decades,
| Swedish ballots only contain party and candidate names,
| no actual language.
| alistairSH wrote:
| This is true here in the US. The paper ballot scans and
| then goes into a lock-box for possible manual recount.
| Arubis wrote:
| Depends on the state. Colorado does do this, for what
| it's worth.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I thought federal law required paper backups as of
| 2016-ish? No pure electronic voting today, IIRC.
| samatman wrote:
| *ahem*
|
| > _and are finally deposited into a box for safe keeping
| /future recounts_
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans,
| supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time
| and energy, you can be one of those humans.
|
| It's completely different from a machine count. Humans
| have human failure modes, which are easily accounted for.
| Machines have random failure modes, and complex ways of
| being attacked. And all of the machines can be wrong in
| one direction at the same time, which is impossible for
| human counters.
|
| Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the
| machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.
| gruez wrote:
| >Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the
| machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.
|
| That's theoretically a possibility, but it's trivially
| defeated by choosing which ballot boxes to spot check
| after the machines have finished counting.
| treyd wrote:
| The idea is that the machine just provides a preliminary
| count, a official manual count happens over the following
| several hours. If there's a discrepancy then the only the
| manual count counts and the machine can be identified as
| problematic.
| sgerenser wrote:
| No manual count happens unless the results of the
| election are in question (very close race, evidence of
| impropriety, etc.)
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Selective audits are standard practice though, where
| issues can trigger a broade r manual recount
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The actual ballots are stored, a selective audit is done to
| verify the electronic count, and in the event that raises
| issues a full manual recount can be done.
|
| The electronic voting system issues in the 2000 elections
| motivated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 under which
| voter-verified paper records for audit purpose required for
| all voting machines (this requirement became effective in
| 2006); effectively, "voting machines" add ballot marking
| machines that may also be involved in convenience
| tabulation, but are always audited against hand counts of
| paper ballots, which are the ultimate authority.
| bryan0 wrote:
| FTA: "Colorado voter votes on a paper ballot, which is then
| audited during the Risk Limiting Audit to verify that ballots
| were counted according to voter intent."
| breatheoften wrote:
| I voted early in person in Colorado a few days ago. Use a
| machine to entry my votes. Votes were printed onto a piece of
| paper. I checked to make sure the marks on the paper matched
| what I entered into the machine and then dropped it into the
| ballot box (not a machine just a box that collected the
| ballots). It was pretty sane and didn't seem like there was a
| lot to worry over related to the electronic entry system.
|
| As to how the votes on the ballots are tallied - if those
| machines are compromised seems like a definite problem --
| though there is at least the option to hand count the ballots
| to compare against ...
| floating-io wrote:
| In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that
| contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes
| machine readable. It then prints the votes in text below.
|
| I absolutely _hate_ that fact. I am a human, I cannot read
| barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if
| the important part of what was recorded is correct.
|
| Not sure if Colorado's are the same...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The value of absolute transparency is why _nothing_ will
| beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English
| counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about
| election integrity watching the process.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll
| be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia -
| machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who
| also can make a mistake!).
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >machines are going to be more accurate
|
| Says who? Also, what does "accurate" here _actually_
| mean?
|
| Speaking as someone who actually understands computers
| and machines: I agree with the commons (who are
| simpletons with regards to computers and machines) that
| machines _cannot_ be trusted to be "accurate" (whatever
| that means) or even trusted in general.
|
| _Especially_ when a simpler, confirmable-by-anyone
| method exists: Having someone count paper ballots by hand
| in the presence of anyone and everyone. That includes
| mistakes and errors. The value here is _anyone and
| everyone_ can and will immediately understand (and thus
| accept) what is going on.
|
| Also, _why_ are we even putting the integrity of the very
| foundation of our democracy on the table in exchange for
| _convenience_ and _cost_ of all things? Are we serious?
| It should be a good thing we are taking precious time and
| money to make sure our democracy is working properly. I
| thought democracy was actually fucking important.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Machines are amazing at counting things without losing
| their place. I'd trust an ATM's counted stack of bills
| over a human's (for sure if they only each got one try).
|
| I've written some code at a previous job to simplify data
| entry. The previous method was adding numbers from a
| stack of papers, with a calculator. I trust my code to
| add up the numbers on the computer over a human reading
| them from a printout and entering them in a calculator.
|
| Humans make mistakes. A lot.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| If the technical problem was solely about counting then
| obviously everywhere in the world we would be using
| machines by now. But we don't. Because the technical
| problem is trust, not counting.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Humans make mistakes. A lot._
|
| To put some numbers on this, from my experience.
|
| Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually
| _average_ ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy,
| at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That 's counting and
| verifying multiple things against processing rules.
|
| General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to
| average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85
| entries correct, out of 100 entries).
| ajb wrote:
| We do it in the UK Volunteers count the votes because
| they want to see a fair election (and there are ways of
| checking if someone partisan slipped some votes into the
| wrong pile).
|
| I agree with GP. Transparency is more important than
| precision in democracy.
|
| Good engineering is about choosing the right technology,
| not just the more recent one. Sometimes the right
| technology is paper.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Almost every democratic country on Earth today does it
| like that, and all democratic countries have done it like
| that for the last 100-200 years. Counting paper ballots
| is just not that hard. Machines are infinitely more
| complex and exploitable.
|
| Plus, you have the extra layer of public perception: it's
| much easier to convince a chunk of the public that all
| the machines in some area are miscounting, than it is to
| convince them that all human vote counter in those areas
| are miscounting, and all in the same direction.
| Aerroon wrote:
| _that all human vote counter in those areas are
| miscounting, and all in the same direction._
|
| And you can send observers that can watch the entire
| process.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >watch the entire process.
|
| "Entire" is the keyword here.
|
| Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's
| practically impossible to vet that what is executing is
| 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited
| somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the
| commons in the first place.
|
| Anyone and everyone can watch someone count paper
| ballots, noone can watch a computer count electronic
| ballots.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Any programmer worth their salt knows that it 's
| practically impossible to vet that what is executing is
| 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited
| somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the
| commons in the first place._
|
| What?
|
| There are entire systems built around doing exactly that.
| Embedded, military, high-trust.
|
| It's never state of the art performance or mass deployed,
| because most people would rather have performance and
| cost optimized over assurance, but it exists and is in
| production use.
|
| You verify hardware, chain of custody from production to
| delivery, track every deployed piece of hardware, then
| lock the firmware and enforce restrictions on anything
| that executes after that.
|
| It's not easy or cheap (or foolproof, as anything can be
| exploited), but it's also not impossible. And
| _substantially_ hardens security.
|
| And for simpler systems with lower performance
| requirements, completely achievable.
|
| F.ex. voting machines don't need to be running 16-core,
| hyperthreaded CPUs running multi-process operating
| systems
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >What?
|
| There is no way to demonstrate that what is executing is
| the source code unless you're compiling at execution time
| from a local vetted copy of the source code. Is the guy
| who vetted the source code vetted? Who vets the vetter?
| Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is
| the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about
| bugs in the compiler? Is the source code even what it
| claims (binary blobs!)?
|
| What about the hardware? Are there any black box
| enclaves? Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be
| generally expected of a number cruncher? Does it even
| have the vetted software?
|
| All this complexity and anyone would be fully within
| their right to say _" I don't and won't trust this."_
|
| Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can be
| immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It's
| simple and it's brutally effective. So what if the
| process takes time? Good stuff usually takes time, what's
| the rush? So what if the human counter(s) screw up? Human
| errors are inevitable, that's why you count multiple
| times to confirm the results can be repeated.
|
| The most secure, most hardened, most certified ballot
| counting machine cannot compare to a simple human
| counting paper ballots in witness of anyone and everyone.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The questions you're asking make it seem like (a) you're
| not thinking about this very hard, (b) you're trying to
| reach the answer you've already decided on, or (c) you're
| not familiar with high trust systems.
|
| Still, in the interest of a conversation, some brief
| answers. Please ask in detail about any you're interested
| in (but realize I'm going to balance the time I spend
| answering with the time you spend researching and
| asking).
|
| "Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted?" Yes,
| because he or she was assigned a key and signed the code
| with it.
|
| "Who vets the vetter?" Whatever level of diligence you
| want, up to and including TS+SCI level.
|
| "Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is
| the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about
| bugs in the compiler?" This is why you test. And it's
| pathological to believe that well-tested compilers, that
| have built trillions of lines of code, are going to only
| fail to successfully compile election code.
|
| "Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs!)?"
| See test and also dependency review and qualification.
|
| "What about the hardware? Are there any black box
| enclaves?" Yes, by design, because that's how secure
| systems are built. And no, the enclaves aren't black
| boxes.
|
| "Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be generally
| expected of a number cruncher?" Testing and validation.
|
| "Does it even have the vetted software?" Signed
| executables, enforced by trusted hardware.
|
| > _Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can
| be immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It 's
| simple and it's brutally effective_
|
| No, it's not. Because people are messy, error-prone
| entities, especially when it comes to doing a boring
| process 100+ times in a row.
|
| You're not comparing against perfection: you're comparing
| against at best bored/distracted and at worst possibly-
| partisan humans.
|
| Human counts rarely match exactly, because humans make
| mistakes. And then they make mistakes in the recounts
| intended to validate counts.
|
| If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail, then
| I'd reflect on why things never fail at your work because
| of people, and everything always runs smoothly.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The point is that humans counting paper ballots by hand
| in the witness of anyone and everyone is and always will
| be more credible than any voting machine ever. You can
| certify the digital chain of trust as much as you want,
| it will not beat human hands counting paper ballots as
| anyone and everyone watches.
|
| >you're not thinking about this very hard
|
| Yes, because the commons _will not_ think very hard about
| a complicated "solution" when a much simpler solution
| already exists.
|
| It's boggling I'm having to argue this to FOSS people of
| all peoples, you guys should know better than anyone else
| that vetting source code and binaries and hardware is a
| fool's errand for something as important as counting
| votes.
|
| >If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail,
|
| Yes, humans fail. It's also not important. Any election
| worth its salt should be counting multiple times using a
| variety of counters and witnesses to demonstrate
| repeatability of the vote.
|
| Again: Humans failing _is not important._
|
| What is important is the ability to verify immediately
| and simply how the vote is being tallied. Machines can
| and will fail (or more likely be corrupted) like humans,
| but we can immediately see when the human screws up
| whereas it's impossible to see when the machine screws
| up.
|
| Nothing beats the brutal simplicity of hand counting
| paper ballots while everyone watches.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Human counters can be biased, and they're definitely more
| inaccurate. Machines, unless actively exploited by a
| third party, will always do the same thing, time after
| time. I don't believe it's worth the extra expenditure to
| hire tens of thousands of counters (again, human counters
| adds manual counting into the process, meaning another
| place for it to go wrong/be manipulated) when machines do
| the same thing with no fuss.
| mattclarkdotnet wrote:
| The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote
| for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you
| vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher
| on one ballot.
|
| While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop
| holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what
| Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it
| compulsory.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug
| feature for a long time.
|
| The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing
| it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite
| direction: trying to selectively suppress their
| opponents' votes further. _If it hurts them more than us,
| it 's a worthy goal!_
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Are you sure? The last time I voted in Germany they gave
| me five ballots (EU, state, county, city, district), some
| with dozens of candidates - per party. I had dozens of
| votes to give.
|
| Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/img
| s/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...
| pedalpete wrote:
| In Australia, (I believe) you have to pick your top
| 5...for a bunch of different items you're voting for.
| Here's an example ballot https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/image
| s/article/2018_LC_Above.png
| bomewish wrote:
| Absolutely agree. Just seems soooo simple.
| briandear wrote:
| And we should dye the thumb of those that already voted.
| dambi0 wrote:
| I'm not sure what problem that solves that crossing
| voters of a list doesn't already solve. What about mail
| in and early voting?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's a fun way to add flare to voting day.
| dambi0 wrote:
| It's only fun if you want people to know you voted. Not
| everyone does.
| jonhohle wrote:
| From a IS centric POV, are there communities where voting
| is looked down upon?
| dambi0 wrote:
| I was mostly thinking people in coercive relationships.
|
| But in terms of communities it might be that voting is
| looked down upon for certain members of that community
| not the community as a whole.
|
| In broader terms while marking people who have voted may
| not reveal who they voted for it does reveal that they
| did vote. This is less private than the election
| authorities maintaining the record of who has voted.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I suppose it could help with duplicate voting since some
| places don't require ID to vote.
| ytpete wrote:
| I believe the idea is that random audits check whether
| the barcode matches the human-readable part, and in the
| extremely unlikely even problems are found they simply
| hand-recount _all_ the ballots ignoring the barcode.
| saas_sam wrote:
| Can you find any website or document that validates that
| these "random audits" are done? By whom and on what
| cadence? I've not been able to find anything like this.
| Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does
| something," and so on.
| lukev wrote:
| Colorado requires automatic risk-limiting audits on its
| election systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-
| limiting_audit
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never
| gonna trust any voting system. _Someone_ has to
| administer the system, do the counting, sum up the
| totals, etc.
| Palmik wrote:
| Asking these kind of questions, and authorities being
| able to answer them clearly, is essential to build and
| maintain trust.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _I 've not been able to find anything like this. Just
| hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something,"
| and so on._
|
| (Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would,
| because of the amount of misinformation around this
| general topic and because of annoyance at people putting
| less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of
| state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the
| laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people
| spending their time trying to secure elections!)
|
| Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"?
|
| There's a page on their SOS site...
| https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html
|
| Which even has a YouTube video on the process...
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo
| shawnz wrote:
| Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the
| human readable text. How does that prove any better or
| worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says
| it did on the slip?
|
| The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to
| reduce the trustworthiness of the system
| floating-io wrote:
| It starts with being able to tell that the information
| was encoded correctly when I submitted it.
|
| Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a
| scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose
| because a dot is filled in?
|
| The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine
| readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The
| difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the
| information is encoded correctly on the ballot I
| submitted if it's done scantron-style.
|
| I cannot do that with barcodes.
|
| It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be
| able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot
| trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my
| vote was submitted correctly in the first place.
|
| JMHO.
| Izkata wrote:
| Pretty sure GP is saying a scantron-style one can still
| be flipped or offset at the destination. They use
| position on the ballot, not OCR, to determine what the
| vote is.
| flakeoil wrote:
| At least the source would be correct so 50% less chance
| of cheating i.e. the cheating did at least not occur
| while producing the vote.
| floating-io wrote:
| It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by
| downstream hardware and software. That's a different
| issue.
|
| It's about the ability for the voter to determine that
| their own part of the process -- the recording of their
| own vote -- is done correctly in every respect.
|
| Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct
| for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now,
| I cannot visually verify that my own vote produced a
| correct printed ballot. I have no way of doing that.
|
| This removes one of the most critical safeguards. If
| something in the software (malicious or otherwise)
| records an incorrect barcode, _I have absolutely no way
| of knowing_.
|
| That's a problem.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| >It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by
| downstream hardware and software. That's a different
| issue.
|
| To me, this seems like the only part worth worrying
| about, and any solution to it should satisfy your
| concerns as well.
|
| Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with
| them (or make it a hash of their voter registration
| number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed,
| the results are posted to a public place. Voters can then
| confirm their ballot was recorded accurately.
|
| This still doesn't tell you that all the internal
| variables were incremented correctly, but you can
| separately aggregate the publicly posted results and
| compare with the aggregate reported by the machine.
|
| The problem this still doesn't solve is electronically
| stuffing in fake ballots.
| gruez wrote:
| >It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be
| able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot
| trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my
| vote was submitted correctly in the first place.
|
| I don't disagree that it's strictly better, but the
| improvements in security are marginal. Any
| audits/recounts would be done by looking at the human
| readable part of the ballot, and would therefore be
| unaffected. Moreover, regardless of whether there's
| barcodes or not, you'd want to conduct proactive recounts
| to mitigate any risk for tampered/broken machines. In
| that case, getting rid of barcodes wouldn't add any
| security in practice.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| With a scantron voting system every single voter becomes
| an auditor. That's orders of magnitude more auditing than
| will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it
| will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine
| made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of
| getting caught. Not so with barcodes.
|
| Seems a pretty substantial difference to me.
| gruez wrote:
| >That's orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever
| be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will
| catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made
| only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting
| caught. Not so with barcodes.
|
| When was the last time you had a printer print the wrong
| thing? Moreover, if an election is close enough that a
| few votes matter, there's definitely going to be a manual
| recount, so any advantage is purely academic (eg. knowing
| that candidate A won by 51.704% rather than 51.703%).
| Point is, either the error is big enough that it's
| trivially detected with spot checks, or the margins are
| so close that a manual recount is performed
| automatically.
| breatheoften wrote:
| I didn't notice any barcodes -- it looked just like a
| ballot a human would fill out but with the bubbles filled
| in as part of the printing
|
| Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr
| codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at
| least banned use of them for tallies
|
| https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-
| Becom...
| bboygravity wrote:
| 1. If all the machine does is mark who you voted on paper
| than what is the point of the machine over a pencil? 2. If
| it does more (for example count your vote) then how did you
| know that it actually did that?
|
| Either way it smells extremely fishy to me.
| mulmen wrote:
| It avoids dangling chads and improperly filled bubbles
| which were both used to steal the 2000 presidential
| election.
|
| I have never used such a machine but the UX _could_ be a
| lot clearer than the analog filp-and-punch machines used
| in Florida in 2000.
|
| I don't love software in the voting process but printing
| the choices is verifiable and reduces ambiguity in the
| voting process.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It seems like quite a stretch to say the 2000 election
| was stolen. There were definitely ballot issues, but Gore
| challenged it and ultimately decided of his own accord to
| concede.
|
| He could have continued the challenge and drawn the
| process out, throwing in throwing in the towel to allow
| the process to end was his choice, it wasn't stolen.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's a bit more complicated than that. Gore lost the
| initial vote count in Florida. He wanted to recount. That
| was fine. He lost the recount, but it was closer. Then he
| wanted specific recounts - to recount the precincts where
| he thought he would gain the most votes in another
| recount, _and to not recount the ones where Bush would
| gain votes_. Also there were calendar issues - the
| December date where they have to cast their Electoral
| College votes was coming up.
|
| It went to the Supreme Court. The SC made two rulings.
| First, in a 7-2 vote, they ruled that Gore couldn't
| recount just in specific spots - if they were going to
| recount, they had to recount everywhere. Second, in a 5-4
| ruling, they ruled that they couldn't keep recounting -
| they had to meet the December deadline with what they
| had.
|
| That second ruling is what people are talking about when
| they say the election was "stolen".
|
| Personally, I think the SC was right. Recounting only
| where you'll gain is cheating - you're trying to win, not
| trying to have an honest count. And if Florida had missed
| the deadline, and Gore had won because none of Florida's
| votes counted toward the Electoral College? _That_ would
| have been stealing the election. It also would have been
| a violation of the Voting Rights Act and a bunch of other
| things.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Thanks for the added detail, that's roughly what I
| remembered as well but definitely a better timeline.
|
| I don't actually remember hearing people describe the
| election as stolen at the time. I know people weren't
| happy about it, but either I just lost that memory over
| time or "stolen" is a newer description of 2000 now that
| its become so commonplace today.
|
| Either way, I have a hard time seeing an election that
| was recounted and challenge GED all the way to the
| Supreme Court as stolen. Contentious for sure, but that
| sounds like the system working as intended rather than
| theft.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I was in High school at the time, I definitely remember a
| feeling that the election was stolen and that Bush was
| not rightfully elected. I don't remember the general
| feeling going away until after 2001. There was a large
| partisan divide at that time.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The difference between then and now was that Gore put the
| country before himself and conceded.
|
| You can be unhappy with a result, and maybe even see a
| path towards changing it, but at some point politicians
| owe it to their country to support its core democratic
| institutions.
|
| Clearly and publicly accepting well-audited voting
| results should be first requirement for presidential
| candidates.
|
| (Said as someone who has thoughts about the 2000
| election, but respects what Gore did as a patriotic
| choice)
| _heimdall wrote:
| Interesting, I was a year out from high school and
| remember it being really contentious. I just don't
| remember the phrase "stolen" being thrown around, but
| that would have been very easy for me to not notice at
| the time or forget since then.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| The earliest that I can find using "stolen" is from 2004,
| it refers to both the 2004 and 2000 elections as stolen:
|
| https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-11-05/electronic-
| vot...
|
| Bonus points for also casting doubt on electronic voting
| machines :)
|
| A further reference from 2012 has the "stolen" language:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/06/yes-bush-v-gore-
| did-...
| acdha wrote:
| The really interesting thing was that Bush likely would
| have won following Gore's recount of only undervotes but
| lost if they'd recounted both under and over votes:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-
| gore-2000-elect...
|
| My main takeaway is that this was within the margin of
| error so we shouldn't go crazy trying to play what-if
| scenarios and getting distracted from blaming Florida for
| having a bad system which produced high error rates. Once
| you're in the noise like that, you've guaranteed that
| someone will be unhappy.
| mulmen wrote:
| Your recollection doesn't agree with Wikipedia:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore.
|
| 1. It was the Bush campaign that asked the Supreme Court
| for a stay.
|
| 2. The initial recount was triggered automatically
| because of the narrow margin. It was not requested by
| Gore. He did still lose it but by a much smaller margin
| than before. It turns out that 18 counties in Florida
| didn't carry out the recount, although Gore never
| challenged this.
|
| 3. Candidates are allowed to request recounts in
| individual counties. Gore exercised that right in four
| traditionally democratic voting counties. Bush had the
| same right.
|
| 4. Later analysis showed that Gore would have lost the
| counties he requested recounts in but if Florida had
| properly counted ballots in the first place he would have
| won.
|
| 5. The Supreme Court controversy comes from Florida's
| requirement to certify results within 7 days. Several of
| the counties that Gore requested said they couldn't
| complete the recount in that time. The Florida Secretary
| of State didn't extend the deadline for certification but
| did allow counties to continue recounts and amend their
| results. The Supreme Court stepped in and stayed these
| recounts, forcing Florida electors to accept the
| initially certified results and blocking any amended
| results.
| mulmen wrote:
| He didn't "decide of his own accord to concede". The US
| Supreme Court decided for him by ending any further path
| to count votes in Florida so Gore conceded when be had no
| other options.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Probably a technicality, but he did still decide to
| concede. The Supreme Court only ended his specific bid
| for a recount, they didn't call the election winner or
| end his campaign.
| mulmen wrote:
| Definitely a technicality, and interesting only because
| he chose country over personal ambition. The Supreme
| Court slammed the door in his face. He could have kept
| fighting but every available path was even more ugly than
| what he and the country already endured.
| cm2187 wrote:
| If it was compromised, it wouldn't flip all the votes, it
| would flip just enough to change the result while staying
| credible. So the question is how many people double check
| the paper ballot. Because if it randomly flips, say 1
| ballot out of 15, and the paper ballot is consistent with
| the tally, it could very well go unnoticed.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Not with a randomized audit, such as this one for the
| 2022 primary [1]. If it flipped just one vote out of 100,
| and you drew an audit sample of just 1000 votes, the
| probability of detecting it would be 99.996%.
|
| [1] https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/13/colorado-counties-
| begin-audit...
| cm2187 wrote:
| What do you audit if both the tally and the paper ballot
| are consistent? The only check possible is the voter
| checking themselves before they hand over the paper
| ballot.
| night862 wrote:
| Are you saying that the only check possible is looking at
| it while its in your hand?
| sethammons wrote:
| The problem stated was that the marker machine lies 1 out
| of 15 entries. The paper would contain an incorrect
| selection occasionally. So, yeah, it would require no one
| noticing during the act.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Indeed, and the math is the same. If out of 3 million
| voters, just 1000 double-check the printout, they will
| detect a 1/100 flip with probability 99.996%.
| sgc wrote:
| And yet somebody who voted said far above in this thread
| that the machine reads a barcode on their ballot, so they
| have 0% chance of verifying if their vote was entered
| correctly. And there is always the added problem of a
| dieselgate style obfuscation: The machine counts votes
| differently when in verification mode than in actual vote
| counting mode.
|
| My preferred machine would be one that did not use
| integrated circuits, but was simple enough that the
| entire board and circuit was visible - with no software
| beyond the circuitry at all. You just need a very simple
| sensor and tally wheels that mechanically advance, like
| those used for measuring wheels etc. No need for memory.
| Keep automation to the absolute bare minimum.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| The ballot printout is not discarded, is it? If not, then
| the ballot-barcode consistency in the sample can be
| verified as part of the audit.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Of course it's important that enough people check their
| ballot and say, "hey this isn't what I meant" it triggers
| a formal audit. Not just letting those 1000 have a redo
| and chalk it up to human error.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Sure, but 1000 is just 1 in 3000 voters. In practice it's
| going to be way more than that, probably 2 or 3 in 10.
| Thats hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are
| going to be punctilious people. Of all the suggested
| fuckery methods, this would be caught the fastest IMO.
| haccount wrote:
| And I guess you didn't sign the paper or in any way had
| means to ensure it wasn't printed with the opposite
| candidates vote in the next room.
|
| Neither did you have the opportunity to also vote for the
| other color of the uniparty and cross check the ballots to
| see they printed identically and according to selection
| liquidise wrote:
| CO resident here.
|
| CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before
| election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop
| off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night.
|
| My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many
| (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid
| out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that
| is what the machines in question are responsible for.
|
| * for some definition of "everyone"
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| An interesting aside:
|
| I'm an overseas Colorado voter. They lump me in with the
| military voters so my voting process is super easy (I'm sure
| certain groups would love to make this harder, but not for
| the troops). I get an email that my ballot is ready, I go to
| the CO website, authenticate with my SSN (fucking yikes),
| fill out my ballot online, print a copy to pdf, slap a
| digital signature on there, and email it back to the SOS who
| presumably prints it out and throws it in with the rest, and
| then get an email saying my vote has been counted.
|
| It's amazing how easy voting can be when we want it to be.
| siffin wrote:
| When you disregard basic voting security, everything
| becomes super easy. Mail-in voting allows for vote buying,
| the only way to avoid this is by having a private in person
| voting booth so the person voting cannot prove to the
| outside world who they voted for.
|
| Even this isn't secure now, because everyone can just
| photograph their voting card within the booth.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Do you have any evidence this is happening? In order to
| swing an election, you'd have to buy a lot of votes.
| That's a lot of people to rat you out.
|
| You're proposing that secret vote-buying conspiracy is
| going on and thousands of people are all keeping their
| mouth shut in order to keep getting that... $10, $50,
| $100 bribe?
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| After your very last sentence, I'm not even sure what
| your point is here. You just listed a bunch of reasons
| you don't think mail in ballots are safe, and then ended
| with saying the alternative also isn't safe from vote
| buying.
|
| Vote buying also does not appear to be a problem in the
| US electoral system, as another commented pointed out: in
| order to make a difference in the election, you'd have to
| buy enough votes that someone would be bound to tell on
| you.
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe you disproved your own claim. Mail-in voting does
| not "allow" vote buying any more than any other method of
| voting. It's simply not possible for the voting system
| itself to prevent vote buying, if that were actually a
| serious problem. But where's the evidence that vote
| buying is a widespread problem in the US? Imagining that
| something is possible doesn't mean it's happening, nor
| make it likely, nor make it a serious problem to solve.
| And on the flip side, the more technology we add in the
| name of security, the easier it is to influence elections
| without people knowing and without having to buy votes.
|
| If you don't want it to be possible for people to buy or
| sell votes, then you need to make sure every citizen is
| engaged and cares about casting their own vote, and you
| need to make sure the government has a stable and
| trustworthy system of checks and balances. And why not
| just make it illegal with massive fines to buy votes and
| post a huge bounty for anyone tattling on a vote buyer
| that gets prosecuted? It doesn't seem that complicated to
| disincentivize vote buying in a way that eliminates any
| concerns about the method of voting.
|
| Oh, hey, look: vote buying is already illegal in the US.
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| > Where am I technically wrong here? I'm sure I'm missing
| something obvious.
|
| As I understand that article, BIOS access requires two
| passwords, and the list only provides one of the two passwords.
| So, instead of "password list" I would say "partial-password
| list".
|
| The list also misses "There is 24/7 video camera recording on
| all election equipment." Of course, you can raise concerns and
| failure modes about video recordings, but that all brings up
| the question "Were those recordings compromised?" You should
| not assume that they were.
| mc32 wrote:
| Here's a telling interview by someone doing journalism rather
| than running cover:
| https://youtu.be/NLi-0WI-f7M?si=o8qktF4d25E3oJ-s
|
| It's interesting that she made excuses for herself but
| previously had no quarter for someone who landed in similar
| position.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| It's only interesting when you oversimplify the two
| situations for the express purpose of sowing distrust.
|
| The only reason you've left out the details that Tina Peters
| actually facilitated physical access to voting machines with
| both required passwords, while this current leak was not even
| sufficient for someone to repeat Peters' actions, is that it
| would be absolutely devastating to your entire argument.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It is important that the voting system have credibility for
| everyone - regardless of party. Has anyone done a ground up
| exercise of rethinking the process and the involved
| technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint? It would be great
| to offer voters verification of their votes while maintaining
| secrecy.
|
| But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the
| country having doubts about the process and the other half
| insisting that it is absolutely perfect. It isn't enough for
| the process to be either correct or trustworthy. It has to be
| both.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the
| process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity
| standpoint?_
|
| Chesterton's fence.
| sethammons wrote:
| I take it that you mean that before you tear down this
| system, understand why it is the way it is. And, yeah,
| sure. I don't think that invalidates reimagining the
| solution from what may be new/updated first principles.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This feels a lot like the people who simply tell others to
| become a poll worker when they start asking hard questions
| about the system. I get the wisdom in this but it can also
| be a waste of time. In other (non electoral) situations,
| many big improvements can and have happened without needing
| to endlessly understand existing things.
|
| In this case it is clear we don't have verifiable elections
| - you don't need to understand anything deeply to know
| this, since it is apparent with your own ballot. So instead
| let's design for something better.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you don't need to understand anything deeply to know
| this, since it is apparent with your own ballot_
|
| Are you giving up the secret ballot in your scheme?
| Timon3 wrote:
| > But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the
| country having doubts about the process and the other half
| insisting that it is absolutely perfect.
|
| It's not correct that one half of the US insists that the
| election process is absolutely perfect. There have been
| countless investigations, inquiries etc. and the process is
| being continuously reviewed. One half of the US insists that
| the process shouldn't be changed to the detriment of minority
| groups without any actual evidence that problems exist (as
| the investigations etc. did not result in such evidence), yet
| the other half still insists that the problems occur and the
| evidence is just hidden too well, and the process must be
| changed without ensuring that minority groups aren't affected
| more than other groups.
|
| This is not a situation with two equal sides.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > One half of the US insists that the process shouldn't be
| changed to the detriment of minority groups
|
| This trope that minorities are affected by voter ID laws
| doesn't pass the slightest scrutiny. It's also just plainly
| offensive and racist to assume minorities can't show the
| basic competency to obtain ID when you already need it for
| so many things. Where were these complaints when everyone,
| including minorities, had to show documentation around
| their vaccination status for various things? Why isn't this
| issue in every other country that does require ID to vote
| in elections?
|
| > without any actual evidence that problems exist (as the
| investigations etc. did not result in such evidence)
|
| A system not designed to generate data for such
| investigations will not turn up evidence. Just like with
| poorly designed software systems.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > This trope that minorities are affected by voter ID
| laws doesn't pass the slightest scrutiny.
|
| It is well-supported by actual research (e.g. [1]) AND by
| simple logic. Every single point you brought up has a
| clear counter argument - why didn't you respond to any of
| them? Have you simply never heard anyone mention them?
|
| > It's also just plainly offensive and racist to assume
| minorities can't show the basic competency to obtain ID
| when you already need it for so many things.
|
| It's plainly offensive and racist to ignore studies (e.g.
| [2]) that prove a higher percentage of minorities owns
| government issued photo ID compared to non-minorities.
| I'm not assuming anything, I'm only looking at
| statistics, at _real people and data_. You 're instead
| attempting to move the conversation away from data.
|
| > Where were these complaints when everyone, including
| minorities, had to show documentation around their
| vaccination status for various things?
|
| First, such complaints did exist back then as well.
| Second, both vaccination and frequent testing were
| subsidized by the government, with extra investments
| towards minorities. Why don't advocates of voter ID ever
| make similar suggestions? Why not propose a program that
| allows any minority to acquire a government ID without
| any downsides, and once that's done propose voter ID?
|
| > Why isn't this issue in every other country that does
| require ID to vote in elections?
|
| Because in pretty much every other developed country:
|
| - there exist standardized, government issued IDs that
| are distributed to every citizen during normal government
| interactions (e.g. in Germany you _must_ own government
| ID)
|
| - poor people (a group that minorities make up a
| disproportionately large part of) have more free time and
| are in far less precarious positions regarding job
| security, and consequently health care
|
| - poor people have a far easier time getting to
| government buildings (e.g. cities are less car-reliant,
| better public transport, better coverage of government
| buildings)
|
| The US is in a very different position compared to most
| other countries. It's just plainly offensive and racist
| to introduce additional barriers to basic rights while
| _fully aware_ that the average person from minority
| groups will have to spend more time and effort to clear
| them.
|
| I'm not going to spend time digging up research for every
| claim I've made unless you're willing to do the same for
| your positions. But since you've now been made aware that
| this "trope" does pass the slightest scrutiny, I'm
| looking forward to your response! Just to summarize,
| you'll have to explain how the disparate impact of
| additional barriers to voting isn't "plainly offensive
| and racist" given that:
|
| - non-minorities are much more likely to own a government
| ID than minorities
|
| - non-minorities on average have an easier time acquiring
| such ID
|
| - non-minorities on average face fewer potential
| repercussions regarding work and health care acquiring
| such ID
|
| [1] http://ippsr.msu.edu/research/voter-identification-
| laws-and-...
|
| [2] https://www.voteriders.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/04/CDCE_V...
| sroerick wrote:
| I certainly don't think we should restrict voting to
| landowners but maybe having a minimum requirement for
| citizens to participate in democracy (having an ID) isn't
| a bad thing.
|
| I think the concern with not requiring ID is that it
| could allow non-citizens to vote. Making it illegal for
| non-citizens to vote also disproportionately affects
| minorities, but that doesn't justify changing that.
|
| Do you know any minorities personally who have struggled
| to get an ID? Most minorities I know would be pretty
| offended by that implication.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > I certainly don't think we should restrict voting to
| landowners but maybe having a minimum requirement for
| citizens to participate in democracy (having an ID) isn't
| a bad thing.
|
| Come on, you can't mean this in good faith as a response
| to my previous comment. It's a fact that minorities are
| less likely to have government ID, and that it's on
| average harder for them to acquire it. This is not "a
| minimum requirement", this is a requirement that - in the
| current system - deliberately shifts power by
| disenfranchising voters.
|
| > I think the concern with not requiring ID is that it
| could allow non-citizens to vote. Making it illegal for
| non-citizens to vote also disproportionately affects
| minorities, but that doesn't justify changing that.
|
| It is _already_ illegal for non-citizens to vote, but I
| 'm sure you know that. You also know that there is no
| comparison between the two things.
|
| The worst part is: non-citizens voting would be a valid
| concern if there were any evidence for this happening
| beyond a handful of cases per election. But there isn't,
| because non-citizens generally don't want to risk being
| caught for one single additional vote. And it's not for a
| lack of looking - the GOP has spent millions upon
| millions of dollars to find anything, and they have not
| been able to procure evidence of non-citizens voting in
| any meaningful capacity. Yet apparently the rules must be
| changed anyway, no matter the cost to democracy.
|
| > Do you know any minorities personally who have
| struggled to get an ID? Most minorities I know would be
| pretty offended by that implication.
|
| Do you have anything meaningful to contribute to this
| discussion? _Any_ response to _any_ of the points I 've
| already brought up? I don't need to bring up anecdotal
| evidence when this topic has been broadly researched, and
| _basic logic_ leads to the same inevitable conclusion.
| sroerick wrote:
| > Come on, you can't mean this in good faith as a
| response to my previous comment.
|
| I sincerely do, I don't know what else to tell you.
|
| > It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, but I'm
| sure you know that.
|
| In many states, non citizens can vote in state or
| municipal elections just not the federal. In states
| without Voter ID, a non citizen could easily register
| with an electric bill. It would be illegal, but it would
| be very hard to prosecute.
|
| > Do you have anything meaningful to contribute to this
| discussion?
|
| I think you bring up great points in a challenging and
| partisan topic. I'm just outlining some of the concerns
| that people have with not requiring Voter ID. You can
| dismiss them as invalid if you want! But I think you
| would have more luck trying to prevent the
| disenfranchisement of minorities if you wouldn't dismiss
| all of these concerns out of hand.
|
| Again, you've made a fairly strong case that voter ID
| disproportionately affects minorities, but you haven't
| made the case that wide swaths of voting citizens are
| actually disenfranchised, nor have you made an argument
| that justifies abandoning the concept of election
| security altogether.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Paper ballots are standard and the majority of states require
| ID to vote.
|
| There was someone using the Michigan voter file (which has a
| line in it for each change to the voters record, so repeats
| voters) to claim that someone was voting dozens of times.
| They weren't airing a legitimate concern about the voting
| system, they were sowing discord by lying about how it works.
|
| Your framing of the situation is reductive and cartoonish.
| EasyMark wrote:
| In texas you pick your items on computer and it spits out a
| paper ballot that you can look at to verify it's what you voted
| for. The info is also included in a qr code like form for a
| reader. In the event that something looks off it can be
| verified by humans. I figured something similar was done all
| over.
| kodablah wrote:
| This is not the case everywhere in Texas. In many places, you
| fill in a paper ballot at a booth and feed it into a machine
| at the end with nothing printed afterwards.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Interestingly, a website set up to document voter fraud by Mike
| 'My Pillow' Lindell has collected hundreds of election law
| violations, many in Colorado. For some reason they are all dated
| for the future though. Might be a warning signal about not
| populating your database where the public can watch you doing it.
|
| https://archive.ph/smlSQ (capture of https://electionnexus.com
| from earlier today)
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| More likely something like hand-rolling timezone conversion
| code.
| gruez wrote:
| I think the timestamp column is straight up broken. I checked
| the first and last few pages and they all have the same
| timestamp.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| No, it's weirder than that. All the samples I pulled up had
| the same date and time without showing any time zone
| information: 2024-11-03 01:43:25
| gruez wrote:
| Is the site satire? There's basically no information of each
| "incident" aside from the state and a bunch of hashtags.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No it's his real site afaik. I'm guessing they put in some
| fake data for testing purposes but are not very competent.
| I'd hate to think that they were just making shit up.
| hobs wrote:
| Then you don't know anything about the election denier and
| liar that is Mike.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't know why this is down voted. The dude has 0
| credibility and is for sure making things up.
| hobs wrote:
| Because a decent chunk of America is in a performative
| cult.
| willy_k wrote:
| It seems more likely that this is just test data, based on
| the time being the exact same for all of the datapoints and
| there being a currently null column for "post url",
| suggesting that these will all be sourced to a social media
| post which at least significantly increases the complexity
| of faking it, especially when there are bound to be plenty
| of posts claiming incidents.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| That would support Colorado having a robust system then and we
| shouldn't be concerned just like the SoS says. If their system
| was bad, they wouldn't be catching the voter fraud.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| The article isn't clear whether they self reported or were
| made aware. The affidavit mentioned someone reported they had
| accessed the passwords multiple times before it was taken
| down. Seems to me someone reported it to the GOP.
| muglug wrote:
| Same guy has been running a $14.88 promotion for a month (14/88
| is a recognised US far-right symbol:
| https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488)
| tryptophan wrote:
| The ADL is a joke of an organization. Professional bullies.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This is just a Q-anon level conspiracy theory.
|
| The ADL has a database full of "hate symbols" that nobody
| uses or some random person on the internet used one time.
| It's a joke and the ADL uses it to bully other groups and
| people into silence.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Do you also believe Walmart is marketing chocolate cookies to
| hate groups or is the price an unfortunate coincidence when
| they do it?
|
| https://www.walmart.com/ip/President-s-Choice-The-
| Decadent-C...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| How many products does Walmart sell, though? I don't think
| they advertise on 'right side broadcast network', which
| also inexplicably advertises 'Trump combat knives' during
| his rallies.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| You can't accuse something of being a dog whistle only
| when Person A says it, but not Person B. It either is or
| isn't. To do otherwise would be applying a double
| standard.
| itsmek wrote:
| I feel like you're missing their point. The person you're
| replying to made a convincing argument that
| differentiates Person A and Person B by considering the
| fraction of products sold and how that affects the
| probability of the null hypothesis (using that price by
| chance). That's not a double standard.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Well, I'm not the person who posted about it in the first
| place, but on their behalf I disagree. There's a rather
| obvious difference between between a retailer who sells
| many thousands of products (where pricing decisions are
| made across broad categories and likely automated) and
| one that just markets a single product.
|
| I don't think Lindell is a nazi, but I also don't feel
| sorry for him for having to fend off such accusations,
| since he is an enthusiastic trafficker in conspiracy
| theories in his own right. He could make the non-troversy
| go away any time by changing the price to some similar
| number, but probably sees it as free advertising.
| Dig1t wrote:
| He's also selling pillow cases for $24.98. Which secret hate
| symbol is that one?
| ttyprintk wrote:
| That's quite weird. Specifically to the BIOS password story,
| nearly every county has a dusty ol computer on that list. These
| appear to be backup systems revived on-demand.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| I think all US folks reading this should volunteer at their
| county's Registrar of Voters (or equivalent agency for their
| county). Spend one election working at a polling place, and
| another election working at the RoV HQ. See what it's like to go
| through the training, and what things are like on Election Day,
| and in the days leading up (for places that allow early voting,
| drop-off, etc.).
| Sabinus wrote:
| This is a very good suggestion. The internet discourse gets
| further and further from reality in a lot of areas. Engaging in
| the actual reality of the voting system is an excellent 'touch
| grass' opportunity for people passionate about the election.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >The internet discourse gets further and further from reality
| in a lot of areas
|
| This is an intended feature, and it's exclusively a feature
| of one political party. The elections are always rigged, this
| one is rigged, the voting process is rigged, just don't ask
| me to present evidence in a court of law...
| alistairSH wrote:
| To what end? Local to me, an "trained" election volunteer was
| still questioning voter's citizenship at the polls.
|
| I'd say this was a fluke if the GOP hadn't spent the last
| umpteen months pushing all this non-citizen voting nonsense.
|
| https://wapo.st/3AsIvnf
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| > To what end?
|
| You'll know what to do.
|
| I worked a total of eleven elections, from primarily
| elections to general elections. I even worked a special
| recall election where the recall was the only thing on the
| ballot. I was a volunteer for all of them. I worked as a
| "Polling Place Inspector", which means I was 'in charge' of a
| single polling place: I did the setup & teardown, reached out
| to the other polling place's poll workers to confirm they'll
| be there, and scheduled breaks etc..
|
| I worked in Orange County, California, which is the county
| between Los Angeles and San Diego. At the time, it was very
| right-leaning. It may be so today, but that doesn't matter
| for this post.
|
| Fun fact: In Orange County, poll workers are the only people
| who are allowed to question (or "challenge") a person's right
| to vote. The general public are not. How do I know that?
| Because it's one of the things I was taught during training.
| You can see it mentioned in [2], on page 11, under "What Are
| Observers NOT Allowed To Do?". (In the document, "precinct
| board" means "the poll workers".)
|
| Now, three situational "pop quizzes" related to the situation
| from the article. In all three, you are a poll worker. Note
| that I will refer to procedures that were in place in Orange
| County, CA, not Fairfax County, VA:
|
| Pop Quiz #1: Someone has arrived to vote, and you do not
| believe they are eligible to vote, what do you do?
|
| Answer #1: You are challenging a voter. You have the voter
| vote provisionally. Their ballot would be sealed in the
| envelope, and their information (plus an explanation of why
| you're having them vote provisionally) would be on the
| envelope. The challenged voter would take a receipt with
| them, giving them a phone number to call, should they want to
| check up on the status of their vote after the election.
|
| Fun Fact: Challenging a voter without probable cause is a
| felony in the State of California. How do I know that?
| Because it's in the instructional handbook that every poll
| worker gets, when they go through training. You can find
| Orange County's handbook for the 2018 election at [1].
|
| Pop Quiz #2: Someone at the polling place, who is _not_ a
| poll worker, is challenging peoples ' right to vote. What do
| you do?
|
| Answer #2: Call the dedicated polling place helpdesk, letting
| them know about the incident. Depending on the person's
| behavior, you may ask them to leave, or you may skip directly
| to calling the police. Your polling place inspector would
| have already looked up the phone number of the nearest police
| station, or you could just call 911.
|
| Fun Fact: As part of polling place supplies, I received a
| county mobile phone. I was specifically instructed to charge
| it up in advance of election day. They were always chunky
| Nokia phones, which felt like they could be used as a weapon
| in an emergency.
|
| Finally, to address your question...
|
| Pop Quiz #3: Another poll worker is challenging a voter, and
| you believe the challenge is unlawful. What do you do?
|
| Answer #3: If you are not able to dissuade the poll worker
| into allowing the voter to vote normally, then you have them
| vote provisionally. The most important thing is to get the
| voter through the process, and their provisional envelope
| into the box. Once that is done, you reach out to the polling
| place helpdesk, letting them know who did what.
|
| Indeed, quoting from the article you linked, "After the
| [polling place] manager intervened, Burrell-Aldana was
| allowed to vote." The article does not say, but I expect the
| polling place manager was already planning on how to
| communicate the incident back to headquarters, and was
| keeping an eye on that poll worker.
|
| If you had volunteered for this election, and you happened to
| be in the situation from this article, then you would have
| known what to do. :-)
|
| [1]: https://ocvote.gov/fileadmin/user_upload/elections/gen20
| 18/T...
|
| [2]: https://ocvote.gov/election-
| library/docs/Election%20Observat...
| alistairSH wrote:
| My point was that despite all the training, some whack job
| was still allowed to work and question voters' rights. How
| many did he successfully turn away? Hopefully none, but we
| don't know.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and
| a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly
| requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not
| sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.
| elmomle wrote:
| One person voting who is not allowed is as bad (in terms of
| fidelity of the vote to legal voters' intentions) as one
| person being kept from voting who is allowed. There is
| copious evidence that these purges, and the atmosphere of
| fear they create, cause far more harm than they prevent.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| From one of the articles about what happened in
| Virginia[0]:
|
| > "Governor Youngkin has been clear: every eligible
| Virginia citizen who wants to vote can do so by Same Day
| Registering through Election Day--that's what our law
| says," said Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez.
|
| > A "final failsafe," Martinez added, is the ability for
| residents to use same day registration to vote early or
| on Election Day.
|
| [0]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/politics/us-citizens-
| caught-i...
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Maybe the best answer would be to just create a system
| where only people who are legally allowed to vote, and
| those that aren't allowed can't, and the provenance of
| any given ballot is very clear and secure.
| dymk wrote:
| Just make a system that works, why hadn't anyone else
| thought of that?
| briandear wrote:
| Nobody wants that. The more mayhem, the easier it is to
| cheat. Same reason the U.S. has such a complicated tax
| code.
| javawizard wrote:
| Sounds great. How do you do that?
| zo1 wrote:
| Are we talking about "Voter ID"? If so, isn't that being
| constantly derailed by the democrats? Just like all the
| issues with illegals and the border wall, which they
| don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.
| defrost wrote:
| > Just like all the issues with illegals and the border
| wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it
| impossible.
|
| How do you reconcile that with:
|
| _Senate Republicans block border security bill as they
| campaign on border chaos_ ( May 24, 2024 )
| Nearly every GOP senator, along with six Democrats, voted
| to filibuster a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on
| migration and reduce border crossings. The
| vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate
| Republican leaders insisted on a border security
| agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill
| before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political
| vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to
| a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-
| seekers and tighten border controls.
|
| ~ multiple US news outlets.
|
| FWiW I'm not American, and it seems pretty clear that US
| Republicans _vastly_ overhype the risks associated with
| the southern border, campaign hard on fear mongering, and
| tank any efforts by the Democrats to address those
| problems.
|
| Politically it's a common conservative tactic having been
| used in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere.
|
| What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and
| just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details.
| Izkata wrote:
| That's the bill that would have facilitated illegal
| immigration, not stopped it. It sounds decent at first,
| providing a mechanism to lock down the border, but the
| "average of 4000 encounters" are 4000 who apply for
| asylum with a hearing at some future date _and are
| released into the country in the meantime_.
| abernard1 wrote:
| As you are not an American, let me educate on what that
| bill did.
|
| Much like the "Inflation Reduction Act" which was a clean
| energy bill that had nothing to do with inflation, the
| bill did the exact opposite of what it claimed.
|
| - It funded billions of dollars for the NGOs which were
| aiding illegal immigration
|
| - It normalized and allowed historically high illegal
| levels of immigration (10x normal)
|
| - It removed the standard process for adjudicating asylum
| by judges and made it part of the federal ICE
|
| - Required the US to fund lawyers for all people who were
| charged with illegal immigration (12 _million_ in the
| last 4 years)
|
| - It gave $60 billion to Ukraine, 3x more than border
| security [1]
|
| - It gave $14 billion to Israel, $10B to Gaza, $2B for
| conflicts in the Red Sea, $4B to Taiwan
|
| During this period where 12 million (3.4% of US
| population) people have crossed the border for residency
| illegally, many of which have been flown in by the US
| federal government, the federal government has sued Texas
| repeatedly while they are trying to build a border wall.
| They have flown in percentages of whole populations to US
| swing states to try to build voters. And illegal
| immigrants count in the census which determines US
| electoral votes.
|
| The reason the GOP voted against it is because it was a
| wishlist for the Democratic party. There is nothing more
| complicated about it than that. If the GOP was such fear
| mongers, as you say, they'd vote for a bill that
| ameliorated their concerns.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-
| unveils-118-billi...
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| You really should read the bill. Our bills are never
| single subject and always have completely unrelated items
| in them. The title is also arbitrary marketing speak that
| is no indication of what the bill is intended to do.
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-
| bill/436...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's hard to build it, but some countries (like mine)
| have universal government-issued IDs, called identity
| cards. You get your ID card when you turn 14 (voting
| starts at 18), based on your birth certificate, or when
| you become a legal citizen through immigration. This ID
| card includes a photograph, and has to be changed every
| ~10 years (slightly more often at first, slightly less
| often as you age). Whenever the government wants to
| confirm your identity, you present this card, including
| elections. On election day, if your ID card is
| lost/stolen, you can get one at any police station within
| the same day (if both your ID card and your birth
| certificate are also lost, however, that is going to take
| far more time to get back and get a new ID, and you will
| not be able to vote - which is a problem, but it affects
| very few people, fortunately).
|
| This whole system is easy to maintain if you've had it in
| place. However, it's very hard to emit ID cards for a
| whole population that hasn't had one before. I'm not
| suggesting this is an easy fix for the USA, even beyond
| the cultural issues that would arise if trying to do a
| federal ID for every citizen like this.
| alistairSH wrote:
| You mean the system we have already? The number of
| ineligible voters actively voting is inconsequential. Yes
| there are a few. Literally a few. It's not the booger man
| the GOP would have is believe.
| layman51 wrote:
| I'm trying to think of this from the point of view of the
| "null hypothesis". Typically, I have heard that you want
| to design your system so that Type II errors are more
| serious.
|
| This is where it gets confusing for me because your
| comment makes me think that people can't agree on whether
| it's a more serious mistake to allow an ineligible person
| to vote or whether we end up stopping (hopefully
| temporarily) an eligible voter from exercising their
| right.
| briandear wrote:
| Atmosphere of fear? Hypobolic nonsense.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Virginia also purged my sister-in-law from the voter rolls,
| a naturalized citizen. Let's just say, I am not amused.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Sounds like maybe it would be good to push for accurate
| voter rolls!
| briandear wrote:
| So is she unable to vote? Virginia has same day
| registration, so it would seem like a non-issue for a
| citizen.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I have to assume same day registration would require
| documentation to (re) prove your citizenship. If you
| can't find your birth certificate or similar on that day
| it would be an issue that your previously valid
| registration was removed and you aren't able to go
| through the process again in one day.
| sroerick wrote:
| It depends on the state but generally just requires proof
| of address or ID, I registered in Illinois with nothing
| but a phone bill.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Oh that's interesting. I don't remember the last time I
| had to register to vote but it was probably done at the
| DMV who would already have on record my birth certificate
| or similar.
|
| If just an ID is used, how do they confirm someone is a
| citizen? Can you only get an Illinois ID if you are
| eligible to vote?
| sroerick wrote:
| My experience is that in getting a state ID, you need
| birth certificate or another document.
|
| In the case of a state without voter ID, there is no
| check -- you literally just have to bring an electric
| bill. A non citizen could easily vote. It would be
| illegal, but the odds of being caught are slim to none.
|
| If there was a suspicion that the voter was illegal, a
| poll worker could have them cast a provisional ballot. In
| places like California, it is a felony to require a
| provisional ballot without evidence.
| alistairSH wrote:
| In theory, yes, she can re-register at her polling place
| But that isn't real-time - it's a provisional ballot that
| gets certified later. This whole purge process (and
| related "citizen only" measures which are literally
| redundant) is designed to create friction and uncertainty
| among immigrant populations and marginally reduce their
| turnout.
| btreecat wrote:
| > Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls
| and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly
| requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not
| sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying
| citizenship.
|
| Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen
| voting in VA.
|
| As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check
| election day that was that wasn't already checked during
| registration. Asking me to "verify" day of, beyond what we
| already do, isn't really feasible.
|
| Recommend you work the polls and educate yourself on how
| your particular locale operates.
| _heimdall wrote:
| This would be my expectation as well. Poll workers can
| verify that a person is registered to vote in this
| election, whether the registration was valid is an
| upstream problem.
|
| If a state is allowing intelligible people to register to
| vote that's a much, much bigger issue and one that can't
| be solved by poll workers.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Understood. The point of verifying citizenship at the
| polls is a stop gap response to intelligible voters being
| on the rolls. The registration is broken. To ensure
| everybody is a legal voter something additional needs to
| be done until the rolls can be fixed.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 1600 alleged non-citizens. There were absolutely citizens
| on the list.
|
| And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal
| per federal statute.
|
| Youngkin and the GOP are flat out wrong here. The courts
| have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having
| to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox
| News.
| sixothree wrote:
| I remember hearing polls workers saying "here comes another
| good republican". Next year they had monitors at the polls.
| briandear wrote:
| Except non-citizens have voted. And the Democrats found
| Virgina over removing confirmed non-citizens from the voter
| rolls. Why would anyone support keeping illegible voters on
| the rolls? We all know why.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Nobody is going to argue that non-citizens should be on the
| voter rolls. They are going to be upset if your method for
| taking them out is too coarse and removes legitimate
| voters, though.
| gedy wrote:
| > Nobody is going to argue that non-citizens should be on
| the voter rolls.
|
| There are plenty of folks who think illegal aliens*
| should be allowed to vote.
|
| * not sure what the political correct term is now tbh,
| double-plus-unnaturalized maybe, ha?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Those people think that they should be allowed to do so
| _legally_.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Non-citizen voting is illegal already. We don't need new
| laws re-banning it.
|
| The numbers of non-citizens voting is small so any effort
| to purge them is as likely to disenfranchise legitimate
| voters as remove illegal voters. That's a net negative.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| And which is this mythical group of people that will be
| disenfranchised if the rule of showing photo id is
| implemented? How many US citizens don't have any form of
| valid id?
| alistairSH wrote:
| https://www.voteriders.org/analysis-millions-lack-voter-id/
|
| ~7 million with no ID ~29 million without an up-to-date DL
| testfoobar wrote:
| What are examples of things one might learn doing this?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Whether your local precinct uses paper ballots as suggested
| by the internet.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That seems like a massive waste of time and energy compared to
| just implementing mail in voting for everyone like Washington
| and Oregon have for so many years.
| mulmen wrote:
| Washington and Oregon still need volunteers to monitor the
| drop boxes and retrieve, count, tabulate, and audit ballots.
| veggieroll wrote:
| I did this (3 elections in a row from 2018-2020), and .... now
| I don't vote, because it became clear to me that the process is
| not trustworthy.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| "In addition to the Department of State Employees and in
| coordination with county clerks, these employees will only enter
| badged areas in pairs to update the passwords for election
| equipment in counties and will be directly observed by local
| elections officials from the county clerk's office.
|
| This is a bit weird. Someone having a perfectly legitimate excuse
| to fiddle with voting machines, urgently, two days before
| elections.
| jack_h wrote:
| As Jeff Bezos said a few days ago: "Voting machines must meet
| two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and
| people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second
| requirement is distinct from and just as important as the
| first."
|
| This is not an election where we can afford doubt.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Bezos? What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say
| about elections and why would anyone listen? He has a
| newspaper to speak for him, why is he saying this stuff under
| his own name?
|
| Edit: i was out of the loop but apparently bezos decided to
| throw his chips out the window for little benefit to himself
| (or anyone). Just goes to show the wealthy are just as
| capable of being morons as the rest of us
| lolinder wrote:
| There's a corollary to the fallacy of appeal to authority,
| which is that it's also a fallacy of rejecting an idea
| outright on the grounds it doesn't come from an authority.
| It's an insightful observation whether or not you like
| Bezos.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I don't really have an opinion about the man outside of
| "growing a business", but how on earth does this benefit
| him? I don't know where on earth you got "authority" from
| as i didn't invoke this concept at all.
| lolinder wrote:
| > What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say
| about elections and why would anyone listen?
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| Paper ballets please. No passwords needed.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Colorado does use paper ballots. These are backup machines in
| case they run low on main tabulation workstations.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| ah, found the person who:
|
| 1. didn't know how Colorado already does it 2. doesn't know how
| hard it is to get humans to count without errors 3. doesn't
| know how expensive having that many temp staff count ballots
| is.
| brundolf wrote:
| Computer security (computer system quality in general) can't
| really be turned into a metric, which means it can't be
| understood by bureaucracies, which means it can't be valued and
| upheld by large public or private organizations, which means it's
| in shambles everywhere that well-intentioned engineers aren't
| upholding it out of their own personal (usually unrewarded)
| integrity
|
| Tale as old as time
| rKarpinski wrote:
| true as it can be
| cryptica wrote:
| Electronic voting is a horrible idea. We should reform the voting
| system to something that doesn't require counting massive numbers
| of votes.
|
| But also, the idea of a president or prime minister is dumb. In
| fact, nobody needs a federal/national government. We should just
| have a mayor for each city or region and if they need to decide
| on something which affects the nation as a whole, the mayors of
| all cities/regions should just get together vote for it.
|
| When is something truly a national matter? Almost never. In those
| extremely rare cases, representatives can get together and vote.
| willy_k wrote:
| According to what I remember from government class in grade
| school, that was more or less what the Articles of
| Confederation established, and it didn't work too well
| especially regarding interstate trade and organization of
| militant forces, largely due to state's endless bickering.
| biimugan wrote:
| Ultimately, people who complain about what methodologies,
| technologies, and procedures x, y, or z states, counties, or
| precincts are using need to contend with the fact that the only
| surefire way to reliably solve these issues is with federal
| standards, funding, and now, seemingly, physical security for
| poll workers and officials. But this level of centralization and
| funding is almost assuredly never going to materialize in the
| U.S. And the people who wield election security as a political
| cudgel know it's not going to materialize. How awfully convenient
| for them.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| "Accidental"
| ttyprintk wrote:
| There are two other nascent problems in Colorado this year:
|
| Ballots printed by Fort Orange Press are failing through the scan
| reader. This is annoying, and small counties appear not to have
| rehearsed the combinations of paper and scanner. There will be a
| lot of hand counting, which requires party-appointed poll
| workers.
|
| A notable but insignificant number of ballots in Mesa county
| failed to authenticate signatures and when contacted, those
| voters said hadn't voted yet. Once the signature matches, the
| ballot becomes part of a large box, indistinguishably. This
| describes something like 3 ballots.
| someonehere wrote:
| The whole voting process is fundamentally broken in this country.
| One side argues we need to fix this and is told it's fine. I then
| see articles like this and can't help but reaffirm they're right.
| jmull wrote:
| Confirmation bias in action: accepting as true information that
| confirms your preexisting beliefs while ignoring information
| that contradicts them.
|
| E.g. this article has information in it that refutes the idea
| that the voting process in CO is fundamentally broken; it
| describes aspects of their security-in-depth which show how a
| single vulnerability doesn't lead to compromised election
| results. (Not to mention the auditing process which would also
| have to be fully compromised for the results of even fully
| hacked voting machines to be accepted.)
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| https://www.cisa.gov/topics/election-security/rumor-vs-reali...
| mulmen wrote:
| In case anyone is wondering what the worst case scenario is
| here's an overview of how voting works in Colorado:
|
| https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/colorado-elections-ballot-cou...
|
| Importantly there's always an audit in which auditors verify
| random samplings of ballots. This audit process is overseen by
| judges from the Republican and Democrat parties.
|
| So even if all the voting software was compromised the audit
| would still catch any manipulation in the vote entry.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Are paper ballots and hand counting such a big problem? To me
| there is something special with the pageantry and ceremony of
| physically going to a central location to vote, filling out a
| ballot, physically placing it in a collection box, and then
| having another human count it. All that pageantry trumps whatever
| efficiency you get from automating this process with computers,
| and mobile phones and databases and internets.
| dannyw wrote:
| They don't create billions of dollars for election machine
| makers.
| wtcactus wrote:
| I don't know why this is so hard in America.
|
| All other developed countries make this work, what are Americans
| lacking?
|
| The system is just: - Keep a list of citizens allowed to vote
|
| - Print paper ballots with the names of the candidates
|
| - ask for a proper ID with photograph
|
| - collect the votes
|
| - count them by hand with the oversee of representatives of the
| candidates
|
| That's it, that's all there's to it and we count 99% of the votes
| in less than 6h.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Because the races are close and both candidates have access to
| the same technology, which also drives them closer, they attack
| the process.
|
| It can be difficult to get on the list of eligible voters;
| different places count different things as a proper ID. If you
| are poor or marginalized in other ways, getting a proper ID can
| be a challenge. The US has a long history of trying to prevent
| substantial populations from voting; it's even designed into
| the Constitution.
|
| Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that votes in
| Pennsylvania that don't have the date written on them
| (properly) but were mailed in don't have to be counted. That
| has nothing to do with the intent of the voter, but political
| factions think it affects their chances one way or the other.
| In some states, you can't give water to people while they wait
| in line to vote.
| Timon3 wrote:
| You're leaving out that a good portion of developed countries
| also offer some form of voting by mail. Some US states have
| rules in place that dictate any mail-in ballots can only be
| counted starting on election day - since they take more time to
| process (for verification etc.), this creates large delays in
| individual states.
|
| Also the photo ID part is different in the US, since there's no
| uniform governmental ID that every citizen is expected to have.
| Minorities are less likely to have such ID compared to non-
| minorities, and (since minorities are disproportionately more
| likely to be poor) on average face larger issues acquiring such
| ID.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Vote by mail is completely negligible in countries where the
| described process works fine.
| Timon3 wrote:
| As an example, in the 2021 election in Germany 47.3% of
| votes were cast by mail:
| https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/01/PE22_036_14.html
|
| Are you trying to say that the process doesn't work fine in
| Germany?
| wtcactus wrote:
| I'm arguing it's not a factor. In Portugal vote by mail
| is negligible and we get the results late the same night.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say.
| Obviously processing mail-in ballots won't take long if
| there aren't many. But as I've shown, countries with
| uncontested elections have many people voting by mail, so
| unless you're contesting the German elections this by
| itself isn't suspicious. And since states have rules
| about when counting is allowed to start, it's also
| obvious that counting them will finish later.
|
| So what is your point?
| wtcactus wrote:
| My point is that other developed countries are perfectly
| able to have a transparent electoral process and present
| the results in very little time, even doing everything by
| paper voting.
|
| Arguments that you need voting machines, or extensive
| mail voting, or pre voting, or not check a valid photo ID
| to be able to carry out the process in due time, are
| completely against what the reality shows in all other
| developed countries.
| Timon3 wrote:
| And yet other developed countries are perfectly able to
| have a transparent electoral process and present the
| results in very little time, even doing both paper voting
| and mail-in voting. Why deprive your citizens of mail-in
| voting when it's not necessary for safe elections? If you
| remove the laws that make mail-in voting take longer to
| count, it will not take as long to count.
|
| Additionally, you seem to be willfully ignoring the
| differences regarding photo ID between the US and most
| other developed countries. Why?
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Other posters have mentioned that there's historically been a
| lot of voter suppression in the US, which has led to a lot of
| people being against anything that would make voting harder
| ("ask for a proper ID with photograph").
|
| However there is another more cynical thing going on, which is
| that in recent times the pro-voting-rights Democratic party has
| also benefited electorally from the increased turnout resulting
| from looser voting rules. This has made any changes to voter ID
| laws impossible to pass federally (where they are currently
| set).
|
| This situation is changing now though because polling and the
| last election suggest that increased turnout currently benefits
| Republicans. Many commentators believe that within a year the
| Democratic party will actually be agnostic on voting ID laws,
| and already in this election you can see that "getting out the
| vote" is not much of a Democratic talking point.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Ah yes, the old rest of the world reduced to a single system.
|
| > - ask for a proper ID with photograph
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws
| efitz wrote:
| Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new,
| additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional
| (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguring the paper size of the
| ballots). They may be mundane (power failure, out of ink) or
| esoteric (logic error). Even computerized counting has a nonzero
| error rate (so does human counting, but that can be challenged by
| human observers).
|
| Computers add cost for acquiring the computers and training the
| staff. Computers add complexity and complexity usually reduces
| the reliability of a process. In a process like voting, that also
| reduces confidence in the process. This and the cost alone make
| it unclear why anyone would want to spend the money to
| electronicize vote casting and counting.
|
| People have been voting without benefit of electronics for
| thousands of years.
|
| In the vast majority of countries where paper ballots are used
| and counted by hand, the count is almost invariably completed the
| day of the election.
|
| Conversely, in the US, where we spend lots of money to acquire,
| maintain and operate computers to "assist" in voting and vote
| counting, now we have many jurisdictions who say that they cannot
| complete counting on Election Day.
|
| It boggles my mind that anyone still supports involving computers
| in vote casting and counting.
| secabeen wrote:
| It's important to recognize that the US system involves many
| more races and questions on the ballot than in other
| (especially parliamentary) systems. Electronic-free counting in
| many states would significantly extend counting times; many
| voters have 20+ choices to make, and each of these choices
| would have to be counted and tracked, which introduces failure
| modes of their own.
|
| Counting by hand makes sense when each ballot paper has one
| race; when each ballot has 25 items, using robust optical scan
| systems common in testing makes sense. Electronic systems also
| open new options for improved accessibility, as long as all
| systems produce a physical record, ideally that is counted as
| itself, rather than a receipt for an electronic count.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are
| insanely complicated and there's absolutely zero knowledge
| the average person has about whether any of the people are
| good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting
| guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political
| groups instead of making the single representative you elect
| responsible for figuring it out. And there's too many
| elections - non presidential year elections give the power to
| a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want
| because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is
| paying attention.
|
| Parliamentary systems are the only democratic systems I'm
| aware of that ever features more than 2 parties in a FPTP
| system as well.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I find it interesting that all the countries that the US
| "helped" to democratize all end up with a parliamentary
| system instead of the US system. Unfortunately I suspect
| the US is just stuck with it.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| It's not just about candidates for positions. I live in
| Colorado which allows citizen ballot initiatives and it's
| allowed us to reject actions of the government the populace
| disagrees with or to enact change they refuse to. A few
| notable examples are rejecting the 1976 winter Olympics
| from being hosted in Denver and the legalization of medical
| and recreational marijuana. Our ballots tend to be large
| and all citizens are mailed out what is know as "the blue
| book" months before the election which is a comprehensive
| guide to all the non-candidate questions including
| pros/cons and financial breakdowns. Between this and all-
| mail voting, we had the second highest voter turnout in
| 2020 and an extremely political engaged and knowledgeable
| electorate. I definitely would not trade it for less say in
| the political process.
| efitz wrote:
| Or we could have more elections, with each focusing on a
| specific topic. The biggest advantages here are that you
| only have to vote in elections you care about and that the
| more we exercise a process the better we get at it. Of
| course the time burden on voters is greater.
|
| Or we could invert a lot of the races. I am college
| educated but never involved in law, how can I reasonably
| pick a judge or DA? What I want is my representatives to
| choose one, and then have a very low threshold for a
| special election to fire ("recall") the person if they do a
| bad job. And only need that because my representatives have
| shown that they won't.
|
| Any sort of non-in-person voting is a security nightmare.
| But I am very sympathetic to the people who want to make it
| easier. I think we should vote on a Saturday or Sunday
| instead of a weekday, we should make it a federal holiday
| in order to close as many businesses as possible, and I
| think that employers who stay open should be required to
| give paid time off to vote, that doesn't count against
| vacation or sick leave.
| efitz wrote:
| Re: FPTP vs ranked choice/condorcet/instant runoff/etc
|
| In US elections, any alternative voting system would
| essentially require computers. With all the complexity,
| problems and mistrust that they bring. Also those
| alternative systems are subject to gamification as shown in
| recent elections in Alaska and France. No fraud or
| illegality, but the will of the people was arguably
| thwarted by introduction of confounding candidates.
|
| Re: parliamentary vs US representation
|
| US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic
| republic) but with a democratic lower house as a
| counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th
| amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama
| from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our
| congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every
| legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It
| wasn't supposed to work that way.
|
| The US was not supposed to be one big country with uniform
| laws. It was supposed to be N number of mostly independent
| states with a common currency + a common defense + a
| safeguards against states taking advantage of each other.
| The basic assumption is that most laws are not one-size-
| fits-all, and that each state should be largely autonomous
| and figure out the laws that work best for that state's
| citizens.
|
| The more people you try to put under the same set of laws,
| the more likely it is that the weak will be taken advantage
| of by the strong. Take California water management- the
| populous cities, in true democratic fashion, determine what
| farmers can do with the water on and under their land, and
| special interests can contribute to campaigns for favor and
| end up getting water rights to water on your land, because
| democracy!
|
| But all these are the "why" of the US election system,
| which is kinda orthogonal to how we vote and count.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > US was designed to have a true republic (not a
| democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as
| a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The
| 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the
| drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now
| our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every
| legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It
| wasn't supposed to work that way.
|
| That's a pretty rose-tinted description. The 17th
| amendment came about because the Senate was cartoonishly
| corrupt under the previous system. It should tell you
| something that it was ratified by the very state
| legislatures whose power it diminished.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| If you're talking about minor elected offices (Clerk of
| Deeds, etc.) be careful what you wish for.
|
| I lived in a country which did away with many of the small
| elections, only to have the positions filled by toxic
| empire-builders.
|
| We went back to elections, where a scandal was handled by
| electors, not union rules.
|
| Parliamentary democracies are usually accompanied by
| competent, autonomous civil services. That's not something
| America has.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Ballots are insanely complicated and there's absolutely
| zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of
| the people are good candidates.
|
| You can say this with a straight face about the
| presidential election because it's a statistical tie. But
| it's laughable at the municipal/county level. Even at the
| state level it's often not true-- e.g., in Ohio were savvy
| enough to reject a marijuana legalization referendum (which
| they overwhelmingly wanted!) because it would have given a
| tiny cartel control over growing it. That caveat wasn't in
| the text of the referendum IIRC, so somehow a majority of
| Ohioans defeated it using their "absolutely zero knowledge"
| of the inner workings of that proposed law.
|
| > So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which
| just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups
| instead of making the single representative you elect
| responsible for figuring it out.
|
| There's a human web of trust lots of voters use to navigate
| the complexity of voting. The more local you get the more
| effective it is. At the municipal level there's a chance
| you're web includes the people directly involved in an
| issue, _in addition to_ people who can help you judge the
| veracity of those people!
|
| > And there's too many elections - non presidential year
| elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority
| which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers
| seize control when no one is paying attention.
|
| Sounds like you're hedging here-- what exactly does "give
| the power to" mean? If you're saying that special interests
| have more power to slip in corrupting legislation or
| install lackeys during an off-year, that's definitely not
| true. The worst stuff gets passed through when there's a
| lot of noise to cover it-- like presidential elections or
| national disasters.
| cryptonector wrote:
| - Counting machines should print on each ballot the running
| count for each race at the point that it counted that ballot.
| This would allow for manual sampling of N pairs of
| consecutive ballots to check that the counts never differ by
| more than one, and never by less than zero.
|
| - Counting machines should be dead simple, and should be one
| per ballot style. We should go back to precinct-only voting
| and forget county-wide voting.
|
| - Reconciliation is an absolute must -- as it's always been,
| but we seem to have stopped doing it in many places.
|
| - Every day of early voting should be treated like election
| day: with results published for each day. This would reduce
| the risk of ballot stuffing after hours because one the
| ballots are counted for the day there are no ballot boxes to
| stuff.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY
| more error prone than computers at counting.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning
| and counting systems here is surprising.
|
| I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems
| are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean _all_ systems
| have to be incredibly complex.
|
| Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and
| reliable, easily moreso than humans.
|
| And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on
| electronic systems: something that's completely impossible
| with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly
| slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or
| the people auditing _them_ ). If you're careful, you _can_ be
| sure that only specific code is executing.
|
| I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized
| voting systems, from programming professionals, _by
| programming speciality_. I have a suspicion you 'd get
| different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to
| pick a couple of examples.
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| > Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and
| reliable, easily moreso than humans.
|
| Such systems are better enough that businesses handling
| cash use them to count paper money.
|
| Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value
| reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?
| blibble wrote:
| so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at
| critical counts such that it affects the result without being
| regarded as having been tampered with
|
| pretty easy if your company produced the machines
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of
| the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?
| blibble wrote:
| what's the failure point? then you work inside that
|
| I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that
| produced food
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign
|
| his entire job was to allow the company to push up as
| close to that line as possible without going over when
| checked randomly
|
| saving them tens of millions a year
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Depends on how many ballots you sample, but the number
| you could change would only matter in an extremely close
| election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it
| triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers
| of auditing and validation to prevent these errors
| whether intentional or not.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Random audits can generally solve this. Take a random count
| from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand
| count. If I'm trying to rig an election I would have to be
| very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the
| systems I hacked aren't audited. I'd have to bribe the
| auditors or something, and at that point it's simpler to
| just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole
| hacking part.
| irq-1 wrote:
| Scanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the
| manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a
| particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to
| change the ballots and test the machines.
|
| Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it
| has a lot of trust.
| joedevon wrote:
| Not sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with
| it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted
| so the entire population could validate at least the counting
| portion of voting.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that
| "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy
| papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't
| we do some basic anti-fraud measures?
|
| Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers
| DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that
| is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number
| is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort
| of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be
| randomly generated.
|
| So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to
| check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The
| ballot is scanned with a scantron.
| rogerthis wrote:
| Why not use the Brazilian system? It's been working for a long
| time
| treebeard901 wrote:
| Way to go. For maybe half of the voters in United States to
| question election integrity right now all it takes is any amount
| of doubt.
|
| They will run with it. You can explain the details of computer
| security all day, and how one password doesnt matter.
|
| They will not listen. They are not looking for details or a
| reasonable explanarion. The voting conspiracy people only look
| for confirmation.
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