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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.
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.
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.