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New Bill Could Finally Get Rid of Paperless Voting Machines (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments. "With the 2018 elections just around the corner, Russia will be back to interfere again," said co-sponsor Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). So a group of senators led by James Lankford (R-Okla.) wants to shore up the security of American voting systems ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. And the senators have focused on two major changes that have broad support from voting security experts.
The first objective is to get rid of paperless electronic voting machines. Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can't be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots. The legislation's second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome). The Lankford bill would encourage states to adopt more statistically sophisticated procedures to count as many ballots as needed to verify an election result was correct -- and no more.
The first objective is to get rid of paperless electronic voting machines. Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can't be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots. The legislation's second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome). The Lankford bill would encourage states to adopt more statistically sophisticated procedures to count as many ballots as needed to verify an election result was correct -- and no more.
Ballot images should exist, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The circular file.
As long as they are talking about making voting more secure, they should add into the bill voter ID requirements
While I feel this is a great step on paper, I will be holding my breath until we see how it turns out in practice. But I can already see the headline, Chinese made US electronic voting scantron machine manufacturer infiltrated by Russians using hack similar to ATM skimming. While I really hope not, I can't help but this this is what it'll become.
Most nerds will understand that doing something manually by hand is way more prone to errors than having it automated. I don't see how having people manually count ballots could possibly be more reliable than having it done by a machine.
People should realize that the vote tabulators for paper ballots are still ancient computers with very little oversight too.
Getting rid of questionable voting machines is a good step. But it's only half of the problem.
Even when the vote collection is itself done perfectly, there's still the problem of who is casting the votes.
That's where strong voter identification processes come in. People who are legally allowed to vote need to be allowed to vote at most once, and only once. Anyone who isn't legally allowed to vote should be prevented from voting, as well.
A lot of people will falsely cry "racism" or "bigotry" when voters are required to provide proper ID before being allowed to vote. Of course, such claims are nonsense. Obtaining and providing valid ID is something that would apply equally to all voters, regardless of race.
It doesn't matter if an election has perfect vote casting/recording/tallying mechanisms if people who aren't allowed to vote end up voting anyway, or worse, people end up voting multiple times.
Two words: Hanging chads.
Voting machines are good as it is, with no proven incidents in the real world of tampering.
This is such a knee-jerk reaction from people who don't understand tech.
Why not simply..
1/ Stop the ability for having physical access to the inner computer, NO USB ports, no wifi, Ethernet module inside the case so you only have one cable trailing (POE) - or two if AC is required to power a small touch screen (really?), go all Apple with custom torque screw drives and lots of them to open these machines.
2/ No internet access for these devices or the server ever, voter lists are loaded into an onsite server which provides DHCP for the voting machines (anything with an incorrect MAC address gets dropped on to a blackhole VLAN).
If I've missed anything...
Listening to the US try to figure out how to receive votes, count, and recount is a lot like watching those infomercials for products where the "old" product is someone in black and white utterly fucking up in ways that a normal person couldn't fuck up.
That's you: US. You are the black and white fucked up person in an infomercial.
you can manually check Scranton and rig up something on fly to recheck as well.
no apple and software + OS needs to be open source software.
We have paper ballots and unconnected standalone tabulators. The more tech, the more chance for issues, problems, etc.
;)
Tighter voter ID would also be on my list for Voter Roll integrity. I am amazed when people just laugh about the number of dead individuals still voting
Exactly. Fake IDs are easy to get which is why it is racist to require them to open bank accounts, fly, buy alcohol, get in bars, etc.. The wealthy whites can easily afford fake IDs while minorities cannot.
Use a pencil to check a box. No chads to worry about.
I voted in the 2016 election and all I got was this Mulder & Scully shirt. Looking forward to 2020!
even "providing valid ID" is easily manipulated. It's quite easy to get a fake ID these days, they scan and do everything a real ID would do.
Fake ID doesn't work quite as well against actual voter ID requirements. Since you need to: Prove you live in the voting area(bill/etc), register before a specific period of time, and have government mandated ID. That really means if someone is going that far to get ID and vote, they're committing multiple felonies, that's on *top* of perjury.
Not only who, but how many times. I live in South Carolina, and you don't have to provide any proof of ID. You just have to say a name, and the poll worker checks you off of the list. In this area, as the joke goes, there's five million people in this state but only five last names, so it isn't hard to guess a name of someone in the precinct. Then, you just vote. That's why you so often see black churches carrying people from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times. I've worked the polls several elections, and it sucks not being able to turn away someone that keeps giving fake names until they find someone on the list that hasn't voted yet.
It's a defacto poll tax combined with voter suppression. Anywhere it's been implemented it's instantly become expensive and difficult to obtain the necessary Id. It's a trick by your friendly neighborhood aristocracy to give you the illusion of Democracy without all the nastiness of the 'wrong' people voting.
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At my last job exam scores were calculated with Scantron machines. Though the Scantron was faster than grading by hand, it is unreliable, so every sheet had to be double-checked by a human. The people had to correct the Scantron results rather often.
One Scantron machine was noticeably less reliable than another; perhaps some maintenance, aligning and cleaning it, makes a big difference.
Electronic voting systems guarantee that it's impossible to actually trust the results of elections.
now end Gerrymandering and repeal Citizen's United with a few well targeted laws and maybe we can talk about America being a Democracy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... and USPS, and landlines, and fax, and credit card imprinters.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I don't see how having people manually count ballots could possibly be more reliable than having it done by a machine.
It makes election tampering more difficult to pull off.
Its funny you think that this happens, because it doesn't
While the financial uses of blockchain get all the headlines these days it seems like it would be equally well suited for usage in a secured and verifiable voting system if implemented properly.
make sure chad is fully punched out
I'm hesitant to put the government in charge of licensing me to participate in their oversight.
Right... Scantron Bubble sheets for all ballots... That's going to be a good thing... (Sarcasm off)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Ehhh......
In the interest of understanding, you should know a bit of my background: I used to build robots, and these days I do a lot of work automating manual processes.
I see it as a mixed bag. On the one hand, a manual recount is more error-prone on the surface, but it's also less error-prone in that a manual review can account for more inconsistency. Where a smudge on the paper might confuse an optical reader, a human would have no problem determining the correct result. Yes, that can be resolved with high-end visual sensors (essentially cameras), but those single-purpose devices are also far more expensive than a human's time. Using statistical analysis also means that the one vote wouldn't matter, but such a situation could be problematic if, say, paper ballots were stored incorrectly.
Having humans involved also drastically reduce the attack surface if interference is considered a viable threat. Having a farm of 500 vote-counting machines means one attack can be repeated 500 times with expected success. Having 1000 humans means that 1000 individual corrupting attacks must be executed, and there's just a slim chance they'll succeed... and a good chance they'll alert authorities. As a check to validate a machine-generated initial count, humans are certainly a safer option.
As with any system, defense in depth is the best option. We expect the machines will handle the initial count correctly, but it needs to be verified by the humans. We expect they'll handle the recount properly, but to ensure the correct methodology, the statistical parameters are being prescribed by law, open to public review and criticism. To ensure the law matches society's expectations, we have the democratic process allowing new representatives to revise the law as needed.
No, it isn't perfect, but it's the best the world has to offer.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
an audit-able voting system that is not connected to the internet and can't be field modified by the manufacturers or by local voting commissioners.
The republicans were the ones banging the drum about illegal immigrants voting and how it was so horrible.
They are also the ones that support auditless voting machines.
https://columbusfreepress.com/...
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Great. Now you just need to provide a free and easy way for folks to get an acceptable ID.
I've worked the polls several elections, and it sucks not being able to turn away someone that keeps giving fake names until they find someone on the list that hasn't voted yet.
This smells like BS. You're saying someone says, "My name is Bill Smith" and you reply "Bill Smith has already voted." Then, they respond with, "Oh, I meant, Bill Jones!" and then you let them vote. If any of this worked the way you've described in this post, one party or another would have stood SC up as proof that there's massive voter fraud.
I recall a few years ago (maybe 10 years?) during the GWB election, that there was an elegant proposal by voting researchers on how giving each voter someone else's anonymized receipt / code to check online via a website later was a very simple method that could audit the results with just a few % of people doing the checking. And people checking get the satisfaction of being part of the system, and/or maybe being rewarded if they find a mistake.
Does anyone else recall this method?
It sounds kind of like the method in China where, to help ensure that people ask for sales receipts and make everyone pay tax -- by looking afterwards for their receipt being a winning lottery ticket on the national website.
It's not that requiring IDs in and of itself is somehow racist. It's that minorities (as well as students and the elderly) are the least likely to have ID that meets the requirements of the law.
So if you don't currently have valid ID, you obviously need to get a new one. And since that costs money, requiring it is akin to a poll tax.
As a result, a federal court ordered Wisconsin to offer IDs for free at the DMV (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html). However, this has not been implemented very smoothly (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-voter-id/wisconsin-official-told-dmv-not-to-push-free-voter-id-cards-idUSTRE78713P20110908).
You could argue that the requirement of an ID is still ok, Wisconsin just did a poor job of implementing it. But really, you've just created an ADDITIONAL barrier to voting (in addition to getting time off work/waiting in a line/registering to vote).
The thing is, the whole voter ID movement is a solution in search of a problem (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html). There has never been evidence of voter fraud at any meaningful scale, and there is little reason to believe people would risk getting caught given the small benefit an extra vote would offer. However, as noted in one of the articles above, voter ID helps increase turnout among those who have proper ID, and decrease turnout among those who are less likely to have it to begin with (people who tend to vote Democratic). There are conservatives on record expressing their preference for lower voter turnout (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw) and we're seeing them get their way.
I love paper ballots. Now let's make better readers. Suggestions for different designs:
1. Standalone reader that can be placed such that the exit of reader #1 can be placed next to the entrance of reader #2 (etc...) for immediate recount during elections.
2. Standalone reader that has 3 scanner heads. All 3 heads must read each ballot the same to exit to the verified bin. Any differences and the ballot is kicked back out the entrance to be attempted again. Voter is confident that if the ballot is accepted, the votes have been properly counted.
Any suggestions for secure ways to transfer vote totals from polling locations to state election headquarters?
There were pretty militant democrats who manned voting stations in my previous district in AZ. They were delighted with the paper machine. They had a trick to make it not count votes.
I think they put papers in badly, so in order to count they would have to be recounted, and they knew that someone in the recount would disregard papers put in that way.
Bottom line: just because its paper doesn't mean it isn't hacked, isn't hackable, or has anything resembling democracy in the presence of cheats.
For fuck's sake. The amount of personal effort involved in voting illegally so far outweighs the potential personal benefit that this is a waste of time that creates more of a problem than it solves. In person voter fraud is next to non-existent. But voter ID laws depress turnout, and typically are implemented in a way that disproportionately affects minorities and the elderly.
How are you so sure that those black churches aren't just taking their members to the appropriate polling places? And what makes you so sure that only black churches do it?
Obtaining and providing valid ID is something that would apply equally to all voters, regardless of race.
And yet the provision of the methods for attainment of ID has been found to be racist in federal court trials in North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Wisconsin, Kansas and probably more.
Hmm, maybe instead of your protests, you should affirmatively commit to ensuring people have ID.
Getting rid of questionable voting machines is a good step. But it's only half of the problem.
The other two-thirds is questionable politicians.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A lot of people will falsely cry "racism" or "bigotry" when voters are required to provide proper ID before being allowed to vote. Of course, such claims are nonsense. Obtaining and providing valid ID is something that would apply equally to all voters, regardless of race.
But those favoring voter ID are almost all Republicans which is predominately white. And when elections go D instead of R they complain about voter fraud, i.e. Roy Moore.
Now if they have election day on a SATURDAY when people can go to the polls...
mfwright@batnet.com
That Twitler will just veto it.
Mandatory voting, e.g. like Greece and Australia.
Polls open multiple days, including over a weekend.
Eliminate Gerrymandering
Those are the things we really need. It's the 21st Century. Really, it's time.
Exactly. Fake IDs are easy to get which is why it is racist to require them to open bank accounts, fly, buy alcohol, get in bars, etc..
Most poor people do not have bank accounts, can not afford to fly, and are obviously of age to purchase alcohol. None of which are requirements for a functioning democracy anyway.
The big question is, "Congress might mandate it, but are they willing to pay for it?" In most states the cost of the voting equipment falls on the counties. Any that bought voting equipment in the last decade are going to fight tooth and nail against having to replace it. I have a friend who works in the electronic voting machine business; she tells me that they're still doing repair work on 20-year-old machines because of counties who don't have the money to replace them.
So you're saying that it's just fine to require an ID to apply for a job or unemployment benefits, purchase alcohol or cigarettes, cash a check, open a bank account, apply for welfare or food stamps, rent a house, rent a hotel room, drive a car, get on an airplane, or even adopt a pet... But asking someone for an ID *to verify that they're a legitimate voter* is going too far?
Uh huh...
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
In person voter fraud is next to non-existent.
Nobody can possibly know that, because our laws make it impossible to identify who is actually casting votes.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If you're really genuinely worried about "vote early, vote often", rather than farting around creating voter ID laws, you could simply mark people's thumbs with an ink stain that takes a few days to fade. Oh look, there's an entire article about it on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
VoterID is one of many poison pills to be added. VoterID is bullshit and everybody supporting it has to get their head out of their asses and look beyond the surface.
Fix identity fraud in the USA 1st only then can you begin to address the VoterID problem... which is not a real problem and we had 8 years of Bush (6 of which was 3 branch control) and now 4 years of GOP control again doing the same old lies about dead people voting but they NEVER prove anything when they have all the time and money to investigate it. 6 years was more than enough but they will have 12 years before Trump is gone and still will have no proof!
You know why we never fix Identity Fraud and social security numbers? Because that is the beginning of the end of all this BS about VoterID. They don't actually want to solve the problem because it is not there; this is all just marketing. Nearly all the VoterID hype is tied to immigration.
I live in Minnesota, and do you know what we use for voting? A paper scan ballot.
It's basically a big bubble sheet. You mark your votes on the ballot by filling in a rectangle next to each person you're voting for. When you're done with your ballot, you bring it to the scanner, and you insert the ballot into the scanner. The scanner double-checks that the ballot is valid (for example, that you didn't vote for two people as Senator).
If your ballot is valid, you get a green "Ok" display, and the election judge at the scanner gives you your "I voted" sticker.
If your ballot is invalid, you get a red light, and the scanner spits your ballot back out. Then you bring it back to the election judges, who invalidate your ballot, tear it up in front of you, and issue you a new ballot.
The paper scan ballot is pretty damn simple. Everyone knows how to fill in a bubble sheet. And when there's a recount, you have paper ballots that you can recount. (And the ballots are less likely to be questionable, because the scanner validated the ballots when you voted - but sometimes, the scanner might miss a stray mark or an incomplete box, so recounts have happened where they've had to evaluate those ballots. But usually, it's smooth.)
Come on guys, do it the easy way. No hassle , plenty of time, secure...
Just mail the bloody things.
Only a moron believes the MSM Russia fantasy tale. Try the DEMONCRATS for the real corruption.
Does voter registration not indicate who is casting votes? Isn't that the point of the registry?
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They should ban electronic machines with no paper trails instead... to reduce the risk of mass voter fraud.
Do you give the student back the Scantron sheet, with each question marked according to what the machine read as their answer? That would be needed in order to see where the Scantron machine got it wrong.
We should just follow UN best practices.
Which call for voter registration, picture ID, thumb marking, paper ballots, see through ballot boxes and immediate public counting.
It literally has all been worked out. But, for some reason, we're special.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments
Typical of the /. narrative we see these days. I haven't seen any evidence that this "danger" exists. The real danger is absentee voter fraud.
This won't go over well with the Clintons. These six senators better get REAL careful or we might be hearing about how six United States senators met with mysterious ends in the coming weeks.
Fixing an election with electronic voting machines isn't foolproof (see Donald Trump for an example) but it takes an absolute landslide victory in the popular vote to have a chance of overcoming it. Any change to laws that would attempt to fix this will not just be allowed to pass.
That is what we use, it makes sense to me, you can literally recount every vote on one machine by a seperate machine in minutes.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Does voter registration not indicate who is casting votes? Isn't that the point of the registry?
If you can't verify that a person is who they say they are, then no, it does not.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Thanks. As I mentioned, we have noticed one machine makes far more errors than another. It sounds like you've been using reliable machines that are properly cleaned and aligned or whatever. Some variable(s) have your machine, and one of ours, working fairly well.
You apparently know nothing about how the voting system works. When I vote they mark down that I voted, this mark isn't tied to my ballot so they can't tell who I voted for but they absolutely know if I voted. Every single state does this, voter turnout rolls are produced by nearly every state and sold to whomever wants to buy the lists. This is how they check for fraud because if you vote twice in two separate precincts the state will know and will prosecute you.
There is a slight loophole where if you are registered in two states you could possibly vote twice, but in separate elections. The difficulty in doing is should be obvious, not only do you get to drive across state lines but you must maintain registration in both states. Though you might pull it off for a year or two eventually one of the states will catch you and you risk years in jail for what? As the parent poster noted, doing so is so unlikely that it's likely single digit instances in the entire US because the ROI is non-existent.
You might be willing to waste a day and hundreds of dollars is gas but the majority of people can't be bothered to vote once, let alone twice. We could dramatically improve turnout in this country by either making vote day a national holiday that everyone gets off or by moving voting to the weekend instead of Tuesday. The reason we don't do this in the US unlike the rest of the civilized world is more poor people might vote, and the US plutocrats can't have that.
And, while they are at it, adopt the "third world" technology of making people dip their fingers in that purple ink that doesn't wear off for a few days.
When I vote they mark down that I voted, this mark isn't tied to my ballot so they can't tell who I voted for but they absolutely know if I voted.
No, they know that somebody voted and claimed that they were you. That's not the same thing.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
And if you want your government to be a tyrrany, allow them to squarely control the right to vote, so they may decide on a whim who does and doesn't get registration paperwork. The UN's recommendations are very dangerous for a democracy.
Normally when you cast your ballet it's name, address, and date of birth for the registration, Some counties do more, others less. That's more than enough to determine if you're eligible to vote. Cast the votes then print and mail them back to the voters, if you see fraud, mail that back to the government and let them know, then you disqualify the ballot. The problem with voting fraud is we don't verify a particular ballot is eligible by any of those criteria; E.g. Chicago elections where the deceased voted early and often.
I cannot predict where any given proton or electron will end up, but given enough cameras on baseball pitches I can reliably determine which balls are non-regulation.
In the same way, I cannot detect each person casting votes, but statistical regressions will detect the presence of most voting fraud (though it doesn't determine which exact votes are the fraudulent ones). And no study in the last few decades has detected a non-trivial amount of fraud. So first, you have to explain how the fraudsters are so incredibly organized that they have tweaked the final results in ways to avoid all detection.
We're special because of asshats like you. Your conservative bros are the ones always trying to fuck with voting and blocking the things like you listed above- all to keep those damned negros from voting. You know this. Quit acting like you don't.
So at best, you cancel your neighbor's vote for you.
No, at best your vote still counts exactly as it would in every other situation. And your neighbors kid rats out his dad. Under federal law, perpetrators face up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. Plus, as a bonus, another $250,000 fine and 5 more years in federal prison for stealing your mail. As an extra cherry on top bonus as a felon he may even miss out on voting next time. giving the other side one less vote next election.
At worst - you don't vote and their vote - against your wishes - is cast.
You don't vote and get everything you deserve.
Doesn't it feel great to be disenfranchised?
At no time was he disenfranchised.
Doesn't it feel great to now finally understand the post you were replying to? You should try it more often.
Usually the district maps are drawn by bi-partisan groups and are routinely tested in the courts to make sure they are fair. What kind of rules do you think we need here that we don't already have?
That is definitely not the case in most states. In Pennsylvania, there is an ongoing court case that was recently taken up by the state Supreme Court that challenges the gerrymandered maps drawn by state Republicans using partisan voter data. Currently the state legislature simply approves the map, so the dominant party effectively gets to choose the map, and can of course make sure it is a favorable one.
Independent redistricting groups are a step in the right direction, but your word of "bi-partisan" shows the flaw in that system too. We don't want "bi-partisan" where the two major parties begrudgingly agree on a map that has "equal amounts" of gerrymandering. They're basically just dividing us up into gang turf at that point, "You take this district, and I'll take this district". We do NOT want that. We want NON-PARTISAN elections that are completely out of the hands of any party's decisions.
The way you do that is with Proportional Representation. We each elect a representative from a choice of all candidates -- no partisan primaries that get to tell us who to vote for -- and use a proportional ranked choice algorithm to determine the winners. The beauty of this system is that it works best when there's lots of choices, so you can at least establish a small number of static "super-districts" that don't need to be redrawn if not completely do away with districts in their entirety. This means our election process is no longer controlled by any party and is fair to all candidates of any party or even independent candidates, and therefore may the best candidate win according to voter interests.
Citizen's United seems like a good decision that upheld the 1st amendment to me. I don't think you can restrict companies and non-profits from making political donations or doing political activities w/o restricting free speech in the process. Maybe we can just require that funding of political activity can proceed with out any limits as long as the source of funding is 100% disclosed and must be 100% from USA sources? Seems to me that the issue isn't the amount of money, but that people may not be aware of the source of the funding. Full timely disclosure of who's donating what to whom would fix that.
Companies and non-profits are not people, they are not living breathing entities. They don't have thoughts, feelings, opinions, they can't serve jail time when they do something wrong. They are completely legal constructs, and as such should not have any rights under the Constitution.
The owners and investors of any company or organization have ALWAYS been completely free to donate to campaigns as individuals. They've never been restricted in that sense. The organization can even issue a statement of endorsement and encourage its members to donate to a particular candidate or party as individuals, that's not been restricted either. At least not in general, there's some basic rules like you can't donate to federal campaigns if you work for the federal government, etc., but for the most part there are no restrictions other than a limit on the donation amount. So this idea that organizations being able to contribute money as "free speech" is a completely invalid argument. They've always had "free speech" with their own personal money as individuals.
What those business owners and investors discovered is that they can use their organizations and businesses as shells to HIDE what they are doing. They can move around lots of money, they can claim tax breaks out on certain expenses. If they donate as individuals, their names are attached to the donation (as it should be transparent!), but then of course if you are a rich Republican or a rich Democrat you might turn off voters if they know you're supporting a candidate. So instead, you donate y
For good reason: you don't want people registering voters to decide on their own which ones should be thrown in the trash. You want a group affiliated with the Democratic party throwing your registration out because they think you may have voted for Trump? Didn't think so.
But back to the sophistry. Vote registration fraud is not vote fraud. Right wingers are perfectly aware of this, but they like to pretend they're the same thing in order to confuse people. Which is one of the many reasons why right-wingers are assholes.
Obviously, three hundred thousand democrat operatives went to ten different polling places each to vote for Hillary, otherwise Trump won hugely.
These three hundred thousand people were illegal black Muslim Mexicans and were paid in weed. None of those three million votes were noticed by the opposition partisan poll observers. None of them said a word to anyone. Not a single Republican infiltrated these hundreds of thousands of operatives and were able to get evidence from the inside. Every Democratic operative was a master spy. 100% loyal and executed the plan with perfect operational security. And they did all this while avoiding swing districts so they could complain about Trump rather than elect Hillary.
Yeah, sure they did.
Just last month they were counting the votes in the Honduras presidential election. The sitting president tried to get a second term (despite a constitutional one term limit). While the vote was being counted it was announced the he was losing the election. Then all of a sudden there was a "computer glitch" and a pause in the counting. In the end it took more than two weeks for the votes to be counted. Of course he won. The Organisation of American States said there were irregularities and that there should be a new election. The US on the other hand congratulated his win and turned a blind eye to the irregularities and the 'minor' constitutional thing. A few days later Honduras was one of the 9 countries who voted in favour of of USA having it's embassy in Jerusalem. It's amazing what can happen when you use an electronic voting system.
Most nerds will understand that doing something manually by hand is...
...the only way they're going to have sex.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
In the same way, I cannot detect each person casting votes, but statistical regressions will detect the presence of most voting fraud
You would have to demonstrate that your statistical methods are valid. Which you can't do, because you have no way to validate them, since you can't ever reliably detect voter fraud in the U.S.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Not Special, just willfully ignorant. Militarism, exceptionalism and religiosity will do that to you. #sad
need to dump the old school players and bring in some fresh blood. also would be good to get rid of term limits, causing the stupid shuffle from office to office for politicians
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All election's systems here are digital, every vote is paperless, cast on a voting machine, and the voter receives a paper receipt (useless IMHO). Surprisingly, the population trusts the system, there are a few conspiracy theories, but the main feeling is of trust. One of the factor of this trust is that the system is totally isolated from the internet, at the end of the voting days, the machines are taken to the election court facility to "count" the result. The result is ready just a few hours after the voting ends.
It sometimes floors me that people who will lock their car, lock the house door, keep their wallets in their front pockets, and do any number of other things to protect their person and property actively argue about taking a simple step to help protect the integrity of their elections.
Most of us don't lock our car or house doors because we've been robbed. We do so to keep ourselves from being robbed. Most people who have security systems have never been robbed. They don't want to be.
So why not take proactive measures to protect the integrity of our elections? We know that Russia was willing to spend money to try and swing our elections in violation of our laws. We know other people out there would like to try and swing our elections in a direction they would prefer. Do you really want to wake up one day and find that someone just walked into your house while you were sleeping and took everything or worse? I certainly don't.
Yes, obtaining a proper ID can be a hurdle. But, we can also identify where the pain points are and help people past them. If everyone is willing to work together instead of just shouting at each other. Given everything in our lives that we need a proper ID for these days it doesn't seem like it should be too much harder to just make an ID that everyone can use and then improve the system by which people can obtain it to work past the issues instead of just shouting that it won't work.
Fine, but you DO realize that this opens up the tradition of "stuffing the ballot box" to just obtaining official ballots (or counterfeiting some), marking them as you see fit and then inserting them into the process before things are counted. If you are really enterprising, you can just substitute a couple thousand votes at a time, inserting your desired ballots for the actual ones.... Cheating CAN still happen w/o physical security.
There is ALWAYS a physical security issue with voting. You have to protect the electronic equipment just like paper ballot materials. Only electronic ballots can be secured though cryptographic means, which makes substitutions of ballots nearly impossible and really easy to detect. Nothing is cheat proof here, the question is what makes it harder to do w/o being detected? I'm thinking that electronic systems win that contest hands down. The PROBLEM is that it's hard to explain to the average voter how it works and why it's secure.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
'Secret ballot' is important.
As I said, it's all been worked out, against some of the best 'election riggers' in the world. It should even be able to stand up to the DNC.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Why do you not buy dead bolts for every room in your house.
I mean if you really want to protect things having each door locked with the best lock you can buy would be proactive against robbery.
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Open source, a reduction of costs, and an ability to audit. Also, no way to modify or counterfeit. https://followmyvote.com/
I think your argument is "you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S., because you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S". Which might be good Zen, but is poor logic.
Why do you think you can't detect voter fraud? Because a lot of statisticians and voting experts think you can. Not 100% of the time, but a lot of the time.
Someone famous has said that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. Sure, tracking down all of those millions would be impossible, but you should be able to find, say, 10000 out of "millions" (less than 1%) pretty easily, right? Or maybe 1000? Or even 100? I mean, some of those illegal voters may be as smart as Lex Luthor, but most won't be, so some of them will screw up and be caught. Or some would sell out their co-conspirators for money.
I don't know how many actual cases of voter fraud were found in 2016. Five? A dozen? Not enough to justify a claim of million or even thousands of fraudsters.
You have to say who you are when you vote. If you want to vote under someone else's name, you have to know that they haven't voted, and that they aren't going to. You'd better believe if someone is turned away because someone falsely voted under their name, we'd hear about it. But it simply doesn't happen. The effort required and the risk are just too great for the meager benefit of getting a second vote.
You seem to discount having poll observers. People can serve as observers at the polling place, and typically there will be at least one Republican and one Democrat observer at all times. They can verify that the ballot box is empty at the start, and that nobody does that sort of shenanigans without being caught. (If the local authorities aren't going to act on reported fraud, it's a lost cause anyway.)
The observers verify that the boxes are sealed with tamper-evident seals of some sort, and that the boxes are stored security.
Having people with differing interests observe things adds a lot of security.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You don't seem to understand my point...
I'm saying that both electronic systems and paper systems require physical security and safeguards such as tamper evident stickers, physical security protocols and the like. So just going to paper isn't going to help solve the issues many think electronic systems have.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Don't assume you know how my local voting system works, you are incorrect, they validate who I am before I vote.
If you think people are running around voting claiming to be other people you're a fool. For one thing they'd be immediately caught when the real person votes, most voting is done in public building with video surveillance. As the time of the vote is recorded it would be trivial for them to obtain video evidence. The risk far exceeds the reward.
I don't know a single person that would even want to bother voting twice because of the sheer hassle of doing so. You would need to know the persons name, and the location they are registered to vote, you'd need to know they aren't going to vote themselves and understand you are risking nearly 5 years in jail to do so. The idea of this occurring as anything but a once off is absurd.
That depends on the issues. Given a ballot box, there's only three ways to tamper: add ballots, remove ballots, or change ballots. Use a tamper-evident seal and store them somewhere secure and you've pretty much got those things covered. If all operations that happen when the seal isn't there are done with bipartisan (or, in better systems, multipartisan) observers, the security is pretty good.
Electronic systems are not as easily understood. We've shown time and time again that we don't understand the attack surfaces on digital systems. If there's a voting machine sitting there with a tamper-evident seal, we really don't know whether there's a way to affect the votes therein that bypasses the seal. Even if the seals cover all the I/O, we still don't know if there's something an intruder might possibly be able to do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Good, you agree that both require adequate security practices and procedures. Without such attention to security, it doesn't matter what method you use.
I don't agree that we cannot know and deal with the necessary attack surfaces of electronic systems successfully. I also think that the "attack surfaces" of paper ballots are widely down played and not fully understood.
Also, I'd like to point out that there are electronic systems that produce an ongoing hard copy paper trail, where the machine prints out a running record of votes cast, ballot by ballot. I think that intelligent system design, playing careful attention to traceability and security can produce voting systems that have all the same traceability of your paper system, the security and convenience of electronic systems. So I contend that we can make electronic systems that are at least as secure and likely more secure than paper ballot systems....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101