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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.

9 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Re:US Post Office always secure. by _Sharp'r_ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Re:US Post Office always secure. by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  3. People casting votes decide nothing by mi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As Stalin once put it:

    People casting votes decide nothing. People counting votes decide everything.

    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.

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    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  4. Re:correction by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Informative
    Let's look at North Carolina https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/appeals-court-strikes-down-north-carolinas-voter-id-law/2016/07/29/810b5844-4f72-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html. A three judge panel found that the voter ID and related restrictions their were constructed to target minorities with "surgical precision" (the term used by the judges). Most damningly:

    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.

  5. Re:Stop them from voting by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean the democratic segment of the population who formulates a fantasy to make their opposition look bad, and then pretends they are the opposition and supports it?

    Do you realize that the recent "Repeal the 19th Amendment" meme was started by Trump supporter Peter Thiel?

    http://www.slate.com/articles/...

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    You are welcome on my lawn.
  6. Re:US Post Office always secure. by DarkFencer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oddly, the party known for vote fraud seems to do quite well in Oregon.

    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.

  7. Re:Drivers License? by meerling · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Mail-only voting by meerling · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dumbass. People do this in their homes, you know, where they receive their mail. If people are coming into your home and strongarming you, you have some other serious issues to contend with. As to getting a meeting where everyone brings their blank ballots, there is no way to keep that shit secret! It will be found out, and the law will be on their ass! It's not going to happen, so you can put your tinfoil hat down, this isn't a hollywood movie.

  9. Re:US Post Office always secure. by dywolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

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    The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.