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LA County Gets State Approval of New Vote-Counting System Using Open-Source Software (latimes.com)
A new voting system that uses open-source software for counting ballots has been approved by California elections officials. "The certification of the new tally system for the county paves the way for other improvements, including redesigned absentee ballot packets, in the Nov. 6 election," reports Los Angeles Times. "It is the first election system of its kind, using publicly available source code that has been certified for use in California." From the report: The ballot-counting equipment is part of a broader redesign of Los Angeles County's voting system, which will include new equipment while relying on a traditional paper ballot. The county's existing system, portions of which are now decades old, has been targeted for replacement for several years.
Damn - considering that every single major tech provider from Google through Facebook through...relies fundamentally on open-source software, the idea that our elections rely on - essentially - DOS-based, closed-source systems for every step from voting through counting is beyond bizarre!
A blue state does the right thing
We need a Federal law to make this mandatory across the country
But, alas, we'll have to wait for a blue congress in order for that to be feasible
Being able to look at the source is great and everything, but which actual bits are installed and configured on the machines is another matter.
Anything with a general purpose CPU shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the election system. A volunteer observer with a high school education should be able to verify, by simple inspection, the operation of any machine involved with counting/processing the physical ballots.
California leading the way once again. While Georgia is closing polling stations in majority-black counties, California demonstrates how to have fair and honest elections. And guess what? When the elections are fair and open and all the citizens get to vote, you get good government.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Basically" means he didn't say it. The use of this word is one of the misleading techniques used by the Fake News.
However, it seems likely he is involved despite what he said or didn't say. But I predict it will go nowhere.
Being open source is less horrible, but there will still be plenty of opportunity of hacking. Most of this hacking is done by (elected) election officials, not Russians. And the Republicans are far better at it than the Dems.
Go for simple paper ballots. Counted in front of scrutineers appointed by the candidates. The scrutineers then report numbers back to their candidates independently from the official system, so no room for fudging.
This is what happens in Australia. And all the votes are counted by hand within a couple of hours of closing the booths. It is a quick and painless process.
I might add in Australia we also have a slightly more complex preferential system, where you order 1, 2, 3 instead of just one X. This avoids the vote splitting issues that the USA has. But it does require a population that knows how to count, even if they lived in a poor school district.
Optical Scan has a killer feature. And that is you can have as many people voting as you have tables. Theres no hardware to break down. If the scanner breaks, go find another one, delay of a few hours at most.
You take the word of the huffington puffington post? You are obviously as partisan as they are.
Besides, it's not universally agreed that paying off the women was a federal crime. Some liberal legal types, who don't have any love for Trump, clearly don't think this was a crime for Trump. Such things happen all the time and if Trump knew or not, ordered it or not didn't matter. If Trump wanted to pay these women off, he could do so and apparently did, but it's no crime.
Also, That Cohen agreed to a plea deal that included a campaign finance violation, doesn't mean he actually committed said violation, only that prosecutors offered him a deal that included this and he decided it was in his best interest to accept the deal. There is a very narrow way Cohen could be actually guilty of the campaign finance violation here, unfortunately this narrow window doesn't necessarily implicate Trump and MAY turn out to be an issue for other campaigns if we really push this narrow definition on Cohen.
Be careful what you push here libby. Like the #MeToo thing, push this at your own peril, because it's going to catch a number of campaigns you are likely to support. This will likely do more damage to your side than mine. So have at it.
I predict you suck Putin's dick, given any single opportunity.
You dumb cunts think you're fooling anyone, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL? PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISON? Your ass is ready, Junior?
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like Republicans!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like Are!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like TRAAAAAITORS!?
Being open source is less horrible, but there will still be plenty of opportunity of hacking. Most of this hacking is done by (elected) election officials, not Russians. And the Republicans are far better at it than the Dems.
I stopped reading right there. You are openly partisan. At leas TRY to keep up a facade of independence when you are dissing the other party. Otherwise folks you are trying to persuade you are right will just stop listening.
I will tell you the following as plainly as I can. There is NO electronic voting system hacking going on, at least none that has changed even ONE vote in any election that I know of. Do you have an example of this? Unless you do, we can discuss future security efforts, but there is no place for accusing either party of malfeasances in dealing with the election and vote counting equipment.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Bobbied you'd suck Putin's dick through the intertubes while wearing Reagan's wig, you partisan hack punk ass bitch complaining about partisanship!? Lol. Watch Trump hang, bitch. Get a good look what awaits your punk ass.
I guess I hit a nerve... I also guess I won the argument given you don't have anything to add. (bobbied)
"Never trust a computer"....Says a guy who - besides posting on /. - probably does much more personally important stuff like banking, shopping, etc... ON A COMPUTER!!
Why does California worry about counting the votes, if they would not bother to verify the eligibility of the people casting it?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You can pretend you refuted my assertion that you'd suck Putin's dick through the intertubes, but I don't hear a strong enough denial to prevent you hanging for treason any more than Trump. #Legacy Bobbied
Ya, it's pretty fuzzy as a story. Not necessarily fake, but the headline is misleading and the text makes some leaps in logic.
To me, "fake" is stuff just made up out of almost nothing - the main business of Breitbart for example.
I love these things: politicians get pressured by a few who actually give a shit, or get cornered into doing the right thing, then spend a decade undoing it. This time, they'll have the entire coding community on their back and those guys never give up a good verbal battle!
Is there an actual repository of actual code?
None of the articles (including in technical press) have mentioned where to find the alleged open-source software.
I found plans and progress reports and PDFs and PDFs, and more PDFs, oh, my!
Nary a source file. Nary a mention of language(s) etc.
Can somebody help me find where it is hiding?
Yes, I looked on GitHub. I realize it's not the only place to look, but the most obvious.
From a Pretty PDF:
"This should include making hardware components available for inspection, and source code to the
extent that the manner of doing so would not jeopardize system security or availability."
"available for inspection"? Is this like how your HOA makes documents "available for inspection"? Looking through paper documents in a cramped office with no air conditioning?
And that "extent and manner" means it is not open-source. If it is not ALL open-source (place don't point to passwords, etc. which shouldn't be in a source code repo) then it's not open-source. Period.
What takes the long time is other stuff. Often they don't count the ballot at the polling place, which is often in someone's house, a church, a school room etc. So there's time needed to drive the ballots to a counting station. That's where a lot of tampering has a chance of occuring - not altering ballots but losing a box here and there from certain districts.
But that's still minor. We have absentee ballots by the truckloads that need counting. Almost all of this counting happens *after* the winners and losers have been announced by television, and after most candidates have conceded. These include ballots from military personnel serving overseas (never mind the scandal of some states trying to cull them from the rolls). In California you can sign up to be a permanent vote-by-mail voter, so you never even head to the polls. There are enough absentee voters now that it's a significant fraction of the electorate. Each of those ballots have to be opened by hand, the name checked against the voter rolls, and presumably the signature is checked. This can take many weeks.
This Mi faggot will say anything, but the fact is fewer than 300 people were involved in-person voting fraud in the last several years on average. Mi is a lying faggot.
So, why don't they count the ballots at the polling place?
Presumably there are officials at polling places overseeing the vote. They can count them. That is what happens in Australia.
Answer: Because the felt need to use expensive computers, optical readers etc. Get rid of those and your problem goes away.
Absentees can be reduced by not voting on a work day which is another "interesting" phenomenon.
Apparently you have no knowledge of American elections whatsoever. The classic way to cheat on a paper ballot election is to either add or substitute ballots (stuffing the ballot box) or simply losing track of ballots (presumably from areas expected to support one's opponents). Note that in a place like LA county there are literally millions of pieces of paper that need be carefully tracked and accounted for in a very short period - a matter of hours. If you believe the system is more honest by adding a group of inexperienced ill-trained party hacks yelling at each other you live in an alternate universe. Bottom line even assuming there is some Platonic ideal counting method real elections are only accurate to about .1% (1 out of a thousand).
Good grief, will we never learn? To make it truly unhackable, you use paper ballots, get about 50 people into the room, and count the damned ballots by eyeball. Not that hard.
Sure. Because none of those 50 people can be bought off, and 50 points of attack is so much safer than one.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
My California ballot often has over 100 entries. Ballots are not just counted. They have to be cross checked with the voter registration rolls and the sign-in sheet at the voting location. Absentee ballots are opened after the polls close. The signatures on the ballot and the voter registration rolls must be checked.
The ballot in each precinct has a different "alphabetical" order. Extensive test ballot packs are run before and after to check for software changes. There is a lot of chances for error and everything is done several times.
When they used my machine, a IBM 370-155, one year, it took over a month to count the ballots. When you see the evening news, it is just an estimate. A large enough sample with a large enough spread has a high probability of being right, but it is still an estimate.
And there is no drivers license at the polls. You can register to vote when you get a DL, but you don't show it when you vote.
Lots of new voters that had never voted before, voted for Trump in Florida. Which is odd don't you think? Because the electoral roll data was hacked by the Russian hackers, and they would have the data for "who never votes", which in turn would tell them what votes they can fake.
Florida still has voting machines that DO NOT RECORD A PAPER TRAIL, and thus nobody can verify the votes from those machines.
They're pre-2007 machines too, unsupported OS, full of security holes. They also haven't done a basic validity check to ensure the total voters through the door equals the totals on the machines.
Which means a) They cannot verify the machine reports the vote the way the voter voted. and b) LOTS OF VOTES MAY BE THERE FOR WHICH NO ID WAS PRESENTED because no voter was present.
So, California only requires id for first time voting (which ensures that illegal immigrants could not vote), but Florida which *does* have a voter id law has a far far bigger problem. Partly because it was hacked, and partly because it has no verifiable audit trail.
I agree that the 1-2-3 system is better than the single X, but it is more vulnerable to vote-selling. It's easy to identify one's vote when you have not n, but n(n-1)(n-2) different ways to cast it. Unfortunately the perfect system does not exist.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
What's wrong with the Robinson Method? Too simple for you? Too trustworthy?
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5
I stopped reading right there. You are openly partisan. At leas TRY to keep up a facade of independence when you are dissing the other party.
Sure, being partisan when two parties are trying their best is bad.
But in this case you have a party that is openly criminal and actively trying to dismantle the country.
Calling them out for it isn't being partisan.
In the same manner, calling people who run around with Nazi-flags out for being Nazis isn't hyperbole.
Blockchain is literately made for this task. Seems a waste to go any other direction.
You will need to buy off 26 people, the one you want to cheat, and the other 25 on the other side to not look while he does it.
No, you pay off ONE counter in EACH precinct and hope some or most of them get through without an audit by making sure it's not close enough to trigger a recount. You wouldn't have to tilt all of them, and some you would just be making closer rather than in your favor (since all the votes are aggregated anyhow). Steal a hundred votes here, a hundred there, a thousand somewhere else. Keep the margins tight, so that one big victory elsewhere (also assisted by buying a vote counter) can cancel them all out.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
So, why don't they count the ballots at the polling place?
Because the volunteers working at a polling place don't have the qualifications or the trust--and don't need them.
I did that job for about three years, primaries and generals, while I was in college. They deliberately keep it very simple, so the three or four random people who showed up to do it can handle it. You check off people's names when they come in and tell you, have them sign on the line, hand them a ballot and an "I voted" sticker, and give them a few instructions. When it's over you pack up everything and drive the ballot box to the collection place.
Presumably there are officials at polling places overseeing the vote. They can count them.
"Officials", indeed. There are several dozen polling places in a small city. How many "officials" should we have just to do something twice a year?
Maybe you should look into how votes are actually counted...
Highly unlikely but then we will hear: "Just in, Vladimir Putin has created a new weapon called Open Source software. We must censor this evil kind of sotware. Hey Microsoft, do us a favor over there at Githib ; ) "
Cuomo, CNN: "Open Source software is evil. Here's why..."
This system seems nice and all, but what is LA County going to do to fix its voter registration rolls. Currently LA county has a 112% voter registration rate, which is obviously means some shenanigans are going on. Judicial Watch is currently suing California over this. https://www.judicialwatch.org/...
From what I have seen, they scan them optically. Then if things don't check out, they might count the ballots (not the votes, just the actual physical papers) to make sure two didn't get stuck to each other or anything like that. Only if that fails to resolve the discrepancy do they actually count votes manually, and only that particular batch that the machine barfed on.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
To make it truly unhackable, you use paper ballots, get about 50 people into the room, and count the damned ballots by eyeball. Not that hard.
Maybe you need to scan the posts you are replying to optically, instead of just going with your idiot talking points.
The PRI in Mexico rigged elections for 80 years using nothing but paper ballots.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Fine, there's nothing you can do about corruption, but what we don't need is a bunch of f'n Russian techs in Moscow screwing with the elections by attacking electronics.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
some change in technology that the people would oppose if given the chance to vote on it, (and years ago DID vote against it) but the powers-that-be insisted on going with electronic voting machines with all the inherent insecurity. Now they'll do it again.
And with the uniparty setup here, with no legit challengers or oversight, and no *desire* for oversight, we'll just get the results that our "elected" leaders want more and more but blame "the voters for choosing" when it goes wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/us/high-tech-voting-system-is-banned-in-california.html
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Scientists-question-electronic-voting-2666033.php
No, you pay off ONE counter in EACH precinct and hope all of them keep your secret...
That is the flaw. Conspiracies are hard, because someone always talks.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I trust a dumb machine that just counts and does nothing else over 50 people doing that same counting. Even if they're all honest, the 50 people are going to make more mistakes unless the machine is broken.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Maybe they talk, but by then it's too late to do anything but take down some bag men. How many elections have been negated due to tampering or fraud? None in the U.S. at least.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Again, irrelevant. You need to read the posts you are replying to, or are you just a dumb machine?
It is possible to have a discussion without the ad hominem attacks, but it is beyond obvious that you don't want to discuss, you want to inflict abuse. Go die in a fire.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Of course it's possible. But unlikely if one of us isn't interested in reading whats written, and changes the topic randomly to suite his talking points.