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Senator Wants Nationwide, All-Mail Voting To Counter Election Hacks (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the wake of the Obama administration's announcement that the Russian government directed hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other institutions to influence U.S. elections, a senator from Oregon says the nation should conduct its elections like his home state does: all-mail voting. In an e-mail, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, told Ars: "We should not underestimate how dangerous... attacks on election systems could be. If a foreign state were to eliminate registration records for a particular group of Americans immediately before an election, they could very likely disenfranchise those Americans and swing the results of an election. Recent efforts by some states to make it more difficult to vote only serves to increase the danger of such attacks. This is why I have proposed taking Oregon's unique vote-by-mail system nationwide to protect our democratic process against foreign and domestic attacks." The only states to hold all elections entirely by mail are Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than a dozen others have various provisions for mail voting. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a breakdown here on how Americans cast their votes across the union. Wyden co-sponsored the Vote By Mail Act in July, and he did so for reasons at the time that were unconnected to cybersecurity. Instead, the measure was originally proposed to help minorities and others cast ballots. The plan requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots to all registered voters. Voters could also register to vote when applying for driver's licenses, too. The measure fell on deaf ears this year and didn't even get a committee vote. A Wyden spokesperson said the proposal will have a "better chance" next year if Democrats win a majority of Senate seats.
Senator, you do know there's a REASON we went to the secret ballot originally, right? Because without it, a political figure who wants to buy votes can easily see if the people he bribed or threatened did what he wanted. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vote-that-failed-159427766/?no-ist)
I've long considered Oregon insane for going to all-mail-in voting, for precisely that reason. I can easily imagine a union getting all their members together and 'helping' them vote. Under the guise of pressuring everyone to vote, they'd actually be pressuring everyone to vote for the candidate that they wanted.
Even if they don't do anything overtly illegal, peer pressure is a powerful thing, and a secret ballot nicely end-runs around it by making it so that you can lie to people about who you voted for, if you like.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
It's much easier to buy/intimidate votes than to tamper with the post office. Now the voter (or their mom,don't forget that recent case in the news) can just drop their blank ballot off at the local party/union/employer/funder's headquarters in exchange for whatever incentive and the ballots can be voted the "right" way. Much closer to the Russian model, actually, where the person officially voting isn't necessarily the decision maker.
How about just making it so we have a disconnected backup, maybe even a paper copy somewhere just in case, and then the threat from "hackers" isn't much of one. But that would expect a modicum of competence, right?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Does "vote by mail" require any sort of ID? If not, how on earth is this more secure than a ballot box?
In pretty much any kind of fraud, people are far less willing to show their face to any sort of authority. Fraud online or by mail is just much easier to work up the courage for.
What's going to stop $PARTY_YOU_HATE from mailing in thousands of ballots for people that didn't vote (the recently dead/felons, people they know directly that didn't vote, etc). When all you need is a name to forge a ballot, no risk to the fraudster, vote fraud will be epic.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not only does it NOT require ID, it is easy to "find" ballots well after the election. Or to make sure ballots are mailed late to certain constituencies (such as overseas military) who may "vote the wrong way" - and thereby ensure their votes aren't counted.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Mail voting is incredibly weak and incredibly stupid.
There is no way to verify that the person voting is the correct person and he is not forced in any way.
Your paper trail is completly useless if you cannot prove it has a proper origin.
Voting in secrecy in a nice voting booth using a simple straightforward ballot is a beautifull system. It is simple enough that you can not only explain it to a ten year old, the ten year old can actually go see for him self and verify proper procedures are followed.
Yet again and again people try to fuck it up with mail or electronic voting schemes.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
why is this not a thing for registered voters?
Senator, you do know there's a REASON we went to the secret ballot originally, right? Because without it, a political figure who wants to buy votes can easily see if the people he bribed or threatened did what he wanted. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vote-that-failed-159427766/?no-ist)
I've long considered Oregon insane for going to all-mail-in voting, for precisely that reason.
Here in WA ballots are SENT by mail but returning ballot by mail is just one of several options, to include: counties organize to provide large, physical dropboxes you can walk up to & place your ballot in.
The fairly long window for voting also greatly increases the cost needed to approimate the fabled 'thugs pressuring at polling places'. Partisan grousers are just mad their traditional methods of supressing/tampering with votes arent readily applied; "I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse to attempted coercion here.
It's my preferred way to vote. Saves me (and the impoverished/the state) from having to pay the $0.50 to mail it back individually.
The far bigger danger to the integrity of elections is of the vote early, vote often variety. Well, that, and dead people voting.
Of course, we could just do what European nations do, which is citizen-verifiable voting, government voter and residency address registration based on valid identification, and a requirement that people carry a government-issue photo id and show it on demand. Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.
Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's because in your poor ass state you did away with DOL locations in poor areas so that poor people couldn't get their license to get ID.
They should really just switch to vote by mail. It's more secure and it's sent to registered voters. If you move, it's a few clicks on a website to update your address or get a form at the USPS. Internet access available to all at a public library.
It's about being open and available and you're state was choosing to not be that way and they got corrected by intelligent people.
Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.
People seem to think that voting has some sort of meaning, and not a placebo to calm and comfort the masses.
Consider that Bernie raised $60 million to Clinton's $20 million, so the DNC quickly moved $60 million from down-ballot elections directly into the Clinton campaign. The popular vote by percentage was almost exactly proportional to the amount each candidate spent, so if the DNC hadn't done that, Bernie would have won.
Then consider that if you swap Hillary's superdelegates with Bernies, Bernie would have won. A candidate can have upwards of 30% more votes, and the superdelegates will still outweigh the popular vote.
Let's not forget that Clinton and Bernie were in a dead heat in several Iowa counties, and delegates were assigned by coin toss, of which Hillary won all 6.
A recent Wikileaks leak shows that, well... here's the relevant quote:
Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not State chairs or vice-Chairs. (Frankly, DNC members don’t really represent constituencies anyway. I should know. I served on the DNC first as Executive Director and then as an elected member for 10 years.)
So if we “give” Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve “won” something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”
On the Republican side, several candidates signed a pledge to support the candidate whoever it should be, and we know how that turned out. "Except when they call my wife a bad name" is an exception, apparently.
And of course many Republicans don't support Trump, and the RNC cut off funding to his campaign and redirected funds to down-ballot elections.
Which prompted the recent tweet: "Shouldn't the goal of the party be to elect the candidate we voted for?"
People think that voting means something, but it doesn't. Not when the party can withhold support and sabotage their campaigns.
(The stock answer is that "The $x party is a private club, they can make whatever rules they want." Why do we even *bother* with primaries?)
No. Not in Chicago.
Modern system is that you cannot remove ballots from the polling area. However what precinct captains can and sometimes do do is to get a bunch of blank ballots prepunch them. Then meet a person outside give them a prepunched ballot which the person then takes and throws into the ballot box while keeping the blank ballot given him. He then turns it over to the precinct captain who pays him.
That is why it is highly illegal to posses blank ballots.
As Stalin once put it:
The only hope for the electorate is to keep the latter group decentralized and otherwise disconnected from each other — to keep both fraud and honest mistakes small-scale and thus unprofitable. Any attempts to centralize vote-counting is the end of Democracy.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Um, yes. He's right. You're wrong. Hard evidence proved voter fraud was a minor problem, while the states' efforts were largely based on keeping people the right wing establishment doesn't away from the polls.
Sorry to disappoint you with these simple truths.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Why not have the best of both? That is what we have in my home state, the "electronic voting machine" is really nothing more than a screen and a glorified printer. When you are done making your choices it shows you a list of what you have chosen and says "If this is what you voted choose yes, if not choose no" and if you choose yes it prints it all out in nice human readable text and you drop it in the ballot box while the voting official resets the machine for the next person, easy peasy.
I really have to hand it to my local election officials, they have voting as smooth as a well oiled machine. When I was waiting in line last election there was a couple of people that had shown up to the wrong precinct,did they force them to go drive to the right one? Nope they just pulled them aside and got on the phone and had it all worked out in under 5 minutes and then gave them the next open machine so they wouldn't have to go to the back of the line, even had coffee and donuts. It was a very pleasant experience, despite the cold rain outside, just lovely.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The panel seemed to say it found the equivalent of a smoking gun. “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” Motz wrote. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.”
So, yes, please go explain how these laws are about protecting vote integrity. And then.explain why if they care so much about vote integrity they don't do anything about absentee ballot voter fraud which is a much more common and well-documented problem.
Does "vote by mail" require any sort of ID?
In Oregon, no. It requires a signature of the voter on the "secrecy" envelope. The election officials are supposed to verify the signature against the registration documents.
If they think the signatures don't match they don't count the vote. They don't notify the voter of the problem, they just don't count it. (The address of the voter is on the envelope, they COULD send a postcard if they thought telling you that your vote wasn't being counted was important to know. Hell, a postcard that was sent to the voter telling them their vote WAS counted would be a good idea anyway.) If you find out about it prior to the end of voting, I think you can go in to the election office and vote in person, but that requires a trip to the county election office and knowing that your vote wasn't counted.
And now with motor-voter in Oregon, the signature they have to match against will be a stored, digitized version as it appears on your driver's license or state id. That makes it impossible for anyone to ever produce your signature on a forged ballot. Yes.
I haven't bothered to check, but I'd guess that those who get their ballots at a PO box and don't care about voting may discard them in the PO itself -- a collection of known valid but unvoted ballots. But the issue is much worse than just mailed in fake or forged ballots. As others have pointed out, vote by mail opens a big wide door to coerced/sold votes. On the other hand, what a marvelous DOS attack to produce and drop off a few hundred thousand fake ballots. No postage necessary, every county has several convenient, free ballot drop off sites, which are usually just a standard looking postal collection box with the sign "vote here". You wouldn't even have to print actual ballots, just the outer and secrecy envelopes and put a piece of blank paper inside. The election folks would be so busy verifying addresses and signatures it would delay the results for days.
Besides the ability to create fake voting sites to gather official, signed ballots to be fixed, there were warnings about "helpful people" who would stand near the official drop sites and offer to drop your ballot into the box for you so you didn't even need to get out of your car.
I am not surprised at all that our dear Doctor Wyden has suggested the entire country go to this system.
That's not what happened here, and it is pretty clear that's not what happened even if you just read this article, even before one goes through the effort of reading the original opinion. For example, they took away Sunday early voting, and the report in question explicitly said that that was a common thing used by African-Americans. Literally every single change they made was one which the report that they commissioned had identified as having a more negative impact on blacks than anyone else.
Do you realize that the recent "Repeal the 19th Amendment" meme was started by Trump supporter Peter Thiel?
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
If a person votes according to a newspaper or union pamphlet's recommendations then that is a decision they freely made since no one is looking over their shoulder in the voting both. However with a mail-in system someone looking over your shoulder is a very real possibility. The two cases are not equivalent.
Vote by mail is not heavily targeted because it is currently largely inconsequential. Many mail-in ballots, absentee ballots, are never even counted. They are only counted if their number exceeds the current margin of victory, its a cost savings thing.
Postal Voting should not be allowed at all, forget 100%. Postal Voting does not provide Secret Ballot.
Assume, someone is either paying your or threatening you to vote for Candidate X. At the voting booth, you could still go ahead and vote for Candidate Y without him being any wiser.
This gets compromised in Postal Voting (and Internet Voting). The guy can make sure you vote for him.
There is no party "known for vote fraud". All studies and investigations have shown voter fraud to be virtually non-existent.
There is, on the other hand, a party that continually tries to restrict voting and disenfranchise voters while raising the specter of that non-existent voter fraud.
A major problem with mail voting is coercion. A domineering husband can tell his wife how to vote, but with mail in ballots, he can make sure she does what he wants. Can you imagine a whole church group getting together to vote in public? Votes need to remain secret.
Also, absentee ballots are historically a huge source of vote fraud, and that's all this is. Absentee ballots for everyone.
For the record, I live in a state that is all mail in ballots. I love the convenience, but the downsides are not worth it.
Play Command HQ online
All studies and investigations have shown voter fraud to be virtually non-provable.
FTFY
And as I recall, a huge number of voters in said "known for vote fraud" party were really pissed at their eventual nominee who appears to have committed vote fraud during the primaries.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You do know that has never been a real issue don't you? It's just fear driven demagoguery.
Besides, you don't just walk in and pick up a ballot, they send it to you. Funny thing, they don't send them to illegals.
Stop insulting our primate relatives!
Smells of horse shit. If any company required you to give unfilled ballots to your CEO, it wouldn't be a company much longer. Someone would drop a dime to the FBI and that CEO and anyone involved would be in Federal prison.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
https://thinkprogress.org/afte...
http://billmoyers.com/story/go...
It is no coincidence that 17 states have enacted new voting restrictions just in time for the 2016 presidential election — or that 22 states have toughened access to the ballot box since 2010. Here are those 17 states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.
It’s also no coincidence that 16 of these 17 states (save only Rhode Island) have legislatures that are dominated entirely by Republicans. NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice calls this “part of a broader movement to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.”
In North Carolina — home to perhaps the most gerrymandered legislature in America — the judges were even more emphatic as they connected the dots between the GOP-implemented voter-ID laws and the desire on behalf of Republicans to tamp down the turnout of minority voters unlikely to cast ballots for conservatives. Their ruling painstakingly dismisses any problem with voter fraud in North Carolina, and compiles voluminous evidence that “the ‘problem’ the majority in the General Assembly sought to remedy was emerging support for the minority party.” The legislature, according to the ruling, “unmistakably” sought to “entrench itself” by “targeting voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party.”
sure sounds like fraud to me.
the real kind.
and then there was Wisconsin shutting down dmvs or changing their hours, to make them difficult to access.
Georgia has moved polling places out of poor and/or black neighborhoods, switching peoples polling places from across the street to 3 buses across town.
your party is blatantly deceitful, guilty of blatantly rigging the vote, yet you call democrats the party of deceit?
and now you idiots are calling for the 19th amendment to be repealed, because if woman couldn't vote, trump would easily win?
let me spell it out for you jack: the party of voter fraud is the republican party
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Sorry, but what was the "vote fraud"? Yes, I've heard the DNC was clearly favoring Clinton in ways which were probably not appropriate, but as far as actual votes, I've seen nothing to indicate fraud. If you've got something reputable, please share. I'm honestly interested.
captcha: manure (how fitting)
In reality though, if the voter signs the ballot (as is done in the vote-by-mail process in Oregon) and the signature matches what is in the voter registry, does it really matter? They endorsed what is selected on the ballot.
What is to say that the nominal voter didn't sign the blank ballot before handing it over to someone else, either under duress or to obtain a reward?
The only way I know of to deal with this is to allow the ballot to be secretly voided at any time (before or after it's been filed) at the request of the voter to whom it was issued. If you anticipate voter intimidation you could request an extra pre-voided ballot, indistinguishable from a real one, and hand that over instead. If you were the subject of unanticipated intimidation you could request that your original ballot be voided and vote again. Of course, this safeguard can be circumvented if the intimidator is able to keep a close watch on your activities throughout the process—at some point you need to be able to communicate with the election committee without their knowledge.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat