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Russian Hacker Conspiracy Theory is Weak, But the Case For Paper Ballots is Strong (facebook.com)
On Wednesday, J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan's Center for Computer Security & Society and a respected voice in computer science and information society, said that the Clinton Campaign should ask for a recount of the vote for the U.S. Presidential election. Later he wrote, "Were this year's deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don't believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other." The Outline, a new publication by a dozen of respected journalists, has published a post (on Facebook for now, since their website is still in the works), in which former Motherboard's reporter Adrianne Jeffries makes it clear that we still don't have concrete evidence that the vote was tampered with, but why still the case for paper ballots is strong. From the article: Halderman also repeats the erroneous claim that federal agencies have publicly said that senior officials in Russia commissioned attacks on voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In October, federal agencies attributed the Democratic National Committee email hack to Russia, but specifically said they could not attribute the state hacks. Claims to the contrary seem to have spread due to anonymous sourcing and the conflation of Russian hackers with Russian state-sponsored hackers. Unfortunately, the Russia-hacked-us meme is spreading fast on social media and among disaffected Clinton voters. "It's just ignorance," said the cybersecurity consultant Jeffrey Carr, who published his own response to Halderman on Medium. "It's fear and ignorance that's fueling that." The urgency comes from deadlines for recount petitions, which start kicking in on Friday in Wisconsin, Monday in Pennsylvania, and the following Wednesday in Michigan. There is disagreement about how likely it is that the Russian government interfered with election results. There is little disagreement, however, that our voting system could be more robust -- namely, by requiring paper ballot backups for electronic voting and mandating that all results be audited, as they already are in some states including California. Despite the 150,000 signatures collected on a Change.org petition, what happens next really comes down to the Clinton team's decision.
If the polls were off in just a few critical swing states, the case for fraud would be stronger. But they were off by about the same amount in all states. Locations with electronic ballots were a bit more pro-Trump, but that may be explained by demographics, since areas with more minorities are more likely to use old-fashioned paper ballots.
Everything was rigged to make Hillary look better than reality, and it turned into one big liberal circle jerk. Just like when all the liberals read their Mother Jones / Upworthy articles, got so fired up, shared them amongst themselves, then wrongly presumed all Americans felt the same way. Nope, far from it.
Any of my non-liberal friends are afraid to speak up because most liberals have extremely vile personalities, and they think you are Satan's Little Helper if you aren't on the same page as them. The vast majority of them won't even listen to reason, just spouting off the rhetoric they read from their left-wing propaganda rags.
Nationalism is back in a big way. First was Brexit, Second was Trump, Next will be Le Pen.
The usual motivations are accessibility and some idea of cost savings. Accessibility because blind people need Braille or spoken ballots, and people are worried about improper influence if a living person helps. Cost savings because they know how much printed ballots cost, and can be buffaloed about how much computerized systems will cost (and about the security concerns).
Paper is certainly better than any currently used electronic method, but it seems like we could do better than that. I'd like to see someone investigate the idea of using blockchain technology to create a read-only database of the election results. The entire point of a blockchain is to create a cryptographically signed set of transactions which can't be altered without compromising the database. Banks are investing in this technology, where trillions of dollars are at stake, and in which every penny must be accounted for. Why not voting data as well?
This doesn't preclude the paper ballot backup as well, which I'd also agree is important. Computers are too easy to compromise, so I'd say filling out a paper ballot and having a locked down system scan it would be best. You then have the original form, as well as the convenience of computers to count the data, and finally, the blockchain to ensure no tampering of the digital database.
Are there any obvious downsides I'm missing? We'd need to ensure privacy, but I don't think this is an insurmountable problem. And done correctly, you could even build a verification system for people to check and make sure their individual votes were cast and tallied properly.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
ok, I'll admit I'm a bit of a libtard troll. I make a bit of a game out of it. But I do actually believe everything I type, and I've noticed a libtard post that used to get me a guaranteed +5 insightful will shoot up and then get modded down to -1 troll.
/. it'd be one thing but when you've got pros doing it full time they're canvassing the web. /. is just one stop on their daily routine.
I'll just come out and say it: I think we've got professional trolls (Russian? Doesn't matter really) pushing a right wing nationalist agenda to destabilize our country. If they were just targeting
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Why not both? You vote electronically, it prints your ballot, you verify it, put it in the ballot box. You get the best of both worlds, you get fast results, and you can go back and check the paper ballots later to make sure the electronic results were accurate.
Watch out, something incredible is about to happen. Somebody is going to apologize to you, on the Internet.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be an ass. It's this damned election that has me so worked up. I'm not even American, but I simply can't believe people voted a narcissistic egomaniac with no idea of the world and who boasts about grabbing pussies as the president of the US. I guess the shock still hasn't worn off.
Also, maybe I am being paranoid about all the fake news topic and Russian involvement, but in Europe there is a real, noticeable influence in the comment sections of online journals of professional Russian trolls praising every decision Putin makes and taking ever opportunity to criticize the US and NATO with bogus arguments. It has been going on like this since the annexation of Crimea. I'm convinced there is an underground war declaration of Russia vs. the West:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.businessinsider.de/...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
It's honestly scary stuff. Then I have to think about how the Duma started cheering and clapping when Trump won the presidency. It gave me the chills that they were not just cheering for Trump, but actually at their own "Successful Operation".
Anyhow, this time, let me respectfully disagree. I think the article you quoted on Business Insider might be wrong or misleading, because the way I understood the page that I linked is, that while there are paper ballots, they are being read electronically by a machine with an optical scanner.