Slashdot Mirror
Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct (arstechnica.com)
"In Chicago, it used to be claimed that even death couldn't stop a person from voting," writes Slashdot reader lunchlady55. "But in the Deep South, there are new reports of discrepancies in voter turnout with the approval of new electronic voting systems." Ars Technica reports: [I]f any state is a poster child for terrible election practices, it is surely Georgia. Bold claims demand bold evidence, and unfortunately there's plenty; on Monday, McClatchy reported a string of irregularities from the state's primary election in May, including one precinct with a 243-percent turnout.
McClatchy's data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County's Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.) Multiple sworn statements from voters describe how they turned up at their polling stations only to be turned away or directed to other precincts. Even more statements allege incorrect ballots, frozen voting machines, and other issues. "George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.
McClatchy's data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County's Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.) Multiple sworn statements from voters describe how they turned up at their polling stations only to be turned away or directed to other precincts. Even more statements allege incorrect ballots, frozen voting machines, and other issues. "George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.
The problemwith election commissions in the US are that they don't care so much about accuracy as they do about the budget and keeping drama to a minimum. So when they see a report of a clearly impossible number, their first instinct is not to investigate and see how this happened and try to correct it. Their first action is to try and make the perception of the problem go away, thus reducing the chance of drama occuring (recounts, bad press, the wrong party winning, etc).
So when the predicted problems with electronic voting machines showed up it was also predicatable that excuses would be made: we're out of budget since we just bought these election machines; at least they're better than the butterfly ballots; we'll look into it, honest; and "look, a Squirrel!!"
You're a great progressive; your bigotry is showing.
It is very much worth noting that the problem with the XKCD article is comparing Aircraft and Elevator safety with Software... why? Because of the law. If you design a bad machine and people die you can be very easily sued out of existence or go to jail. Just imagine that every plane and elevator had a sign posted saying, ride at your own risk because we are not responsible for a malfunction taking your limbs or life... a lot of folks would be taking the stairs and driving places instead.
Write software and you just say, not responsible for my shitty work because we have no standards for expediency and cost purposes.
Changing the law so that software is not allowed to escape a law suit with a simple tos agreement would change a whole farking load of things.
"I don't quiet know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."
Making the field as culpable for its fuck up like manufacturers would change that shit real fucking fast. Shit programmers would be tossed very quickly and several of those "awesome" programmers able to cut corners super fast would fall from grace with some epic face plants into the concrete below.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/days-after-activists-sued-georgias-election-server-was-wiped-clean/
They wiped the drive and degaussed it two days after a lawsuit demanding the data was filed. Suspicious as fuck. What the investigator found was the voting information was public, together with passwords, login details for the machines. In other words, anyone could set any election result and they had no way of verifying it.
I'll say it again, don't show "unity" over the result of the vote, challenge it, force checks and verification until there is no reasonable doubt possible over the result. You only need one fraudulent election to lose a democracy forever, because all subsequent elections will be fraudulent.
It's worth the effort to challenge and verify the data. "One man one vote", not "One Russian hacker, one million votes".
Voting is one of the few times that a blockchain could actually make things better.
You vote on the computer and get a receipt with a secret transaction ID on it. You can then verify your vote against the public blockchain any time you like using that transaction ID (which is anonymous), and anyone can verify the overall count and integrity of the chain too.
Some care will be required to make sure the votes remain anonymous. The most obvious risk is correlating people's visits to the polling station with transactions on the blockchain, but there are ways to prevent that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.
12 years ago I did a few rounds as an election tech in GA shortly after they first started using the electronic machines. Back then the machines had the capability to each print out a record of votes counted with a built-in printer that had memory independent from the unit's main memory. This was done so there was still a way to retrieve the votes from the machine both as a fail-safe if the machine became disabled as well as an audit trail in case of discrepancies. It was a matter of procedure that the precincts had to generate the "receipt" print-out from each machine and send them into the county Board of Elections office with the memory card and stack of tokens so the officials could make sure there was at least a card for each vote according to the printed totals. While they did that, I was inserting the memory card and dialing up the Secretary of State server for the uploads.
Our entire political system (most notably the Senate and the Electoral college) is built to lesson the effects of Democracy and disenfranchise the 'wrong' type of voter.
How, precisely, do the senate and electoral college disenfranchise people? They dilute the power of larger states, but how does that correlate to disenfranchisement?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Once you add in electronics, tranparency dissapears. The only sound way to vote, get ballot, get pencil, put 'X' in appropriate box, put ballot in poll box. After voting over, representatives from those running for the election along with government officers, open each box, one at a time, empty out and count each ballot individual, with representatives from each person running for the election checking each and every vote. Voting is about people, not machine. The one and only reason for electronic voting is mass voter fraud, last election was so bad, even when recounts were paid for they were actively blocked. US voting is a corrupt as any third world tin pot dictator voting and it's not Russia hacking, it's the deep state and shadow government hacking.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen