Safest Voting Method Is Using Paper, Leading Cyber Expert Says (bloomberg.com) 169
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Election voting is the cybersecurity industry's most difficult challenge, and casting ballots on paper is the safest option against any digital disruptions, saysCrowdStrikeHoldings co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Alperovitch. "Voting is the hardest thing to secure when it comes to cybersecurity," Alperovitch said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "The only way we know how to do it well and safely is by using paper." The best ways to ensure that a digital hack won't happen, he said, are in-person voting and ballots that are either mailed in or dropped off at collection sites. Alperovitch said he hasn't seen evidence of Russian hacking into campaigns or political organizations and leaking information so far this year. He warned of "influence operations" by China, Iran, and Russia conducted through social media. U.S. intelligence agencieshave saidRussia is still using social media and television to help President Donald Trump, while China and Iran want the Democratic candidate Joe Biden to win the presidency in November.
The election infrastructure, which includes voter databases and vote-tallying and vote-reporting systems, is "very, very, vulnerable to hacking," Alperovitch added. "I'm not so much concerned about foreign entities interfering in the paper process, but we do need to make sure that states are prepared to take in the huge number of mail-in ballots that will come in." One less-discussed but viable option is ballot drop-off, Alperovitch said. All precincts should install drop boxes by the curbside, where people can drop off the ballot without using the mail, he said. The election in November may be one where "we may not know who the president is the night of the election or the day after," Alperovitch said, echoingcommentslast week byFacebook's head of cybersecurity policy. The social media platform is preparing to rein-in misinformation in a prolonged period before the result is released.
The election infrastructure, which includes voter databases and vote-tallying and vote-reporting systems, is "very, very, vulnerable to hacking," Alperovitch added. "I'm not so much concerned about foreign entities interfering in the paper process, but we do need to make sure that states are prepared to take in the huge number of mail-in ballots that will come in." One less-discussed but viable option is ballot drop-off, Alperovitch said. All precincts should install drop boxes by the curbside, where people can drop off the ballot without using the mail, he said. The election in November may be one where "we may not know who the president is the night of the election or the day after," Alperovitch said, echoingcommentslast week byFacebook's head of cybersecurity policy. The social media platform is preparing to rein-in misinformation in a prolonged period before the result is released.
The horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
"we may not know who the president is the night of the election or the day after,"
Oh the humanity! Making sure all votes are counted and properly recorded takes time. Imagine how long it took for results to be known during the first hundred years after the founding of this country. I don't remember anyone whining back then they didn't know right away.
And for those who are going to say we've progressed where this delay isn't necessary, we're still using the same system of voting wherein the person who receives the most votes may not win. How about we progress beyond that?
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"And for those who are going to say we've progressed where this delay isn't necessary, we're still using the same system of voting wherein the person who receives the most votes may not win. How about we progress beyond that?"
That's a horrible idea. Our founders were incredibly smart in baking in all kinds of protections into the system. The electoral college preserves the union. Without that it's just a contest to get the most people into a state so that your state can control the election. And at that poi
Re:The horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
I call complete BS. Representation of minority viewpoints would require replacing out winner take all system to one where a party would win a percentage of the seats instead of our winner take all arrangements. Electoral college gives out sized power to the "purple" states and further distorts representations rather than alleviating it. We get the president candidates from the early voting states for primaries, and then let a handful of purple states choose between them. Live in a solid blue/red state? Too bad, you will only get enough attention to get the low hanging donations to pump the purple states full of political ads. Funding is mostly from big donors to parties, so you have to corrupt your morals pretty completely just to get on the ballot in the first place.
You'd have to get pretty creative to come up with any more of an effed up system than we have.
Re:The horror! (Score:5, Informative)
The electoral college preserves the union.
It does no such thing. As the Supreme Court recently ruled, electoral voters may be bound to their party's nomination, the complete opposite of what the Founders intended. Doubt me? What was the reasoning behind the electoral college? That the people may not know of the qualifications of the candidate and so learned men (and it was men at the time) should be able to use their judgement to prevent a usurpation. To quote [factcheck.org]:
As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”
In other words, those in the electoral college are supposed to substitute their own judgement in determining who is qualified to hold the office. Which is exactly what happened in 2016. A few electors chose not to vote according to the majority because they determined (rightly so) the con artist was not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
The only thing the electoral college does is game the system. As we have seen several times in our history, all one need do is collect a few specific states and they can win without holding a majority of the votes. By having a direct vote, each vote cast would be even more important than it is now and no, big states like California would not dominate. They are large enough and have a diverse enough population that their own votes would be split, unlike states such as Iowa, Montana, Utah and several others whose population effectively votes in lockstep.
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unlike states such as Iowa, Montana, Utah and several others whose population effectively votes in lockstep.
Worth pointing out that only 45.5% of Utah's "lockstep" votes were cast for Donald Trump.
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What was the reasoning behind the electoral college?
Who cares what claims were made, or even if those claims of intent are truthful? The result is that some people's votes are worth more than others. It has no place in a system in which all men are allegedly created equal.
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Question, how many votes should each nation get in the United Nations? If you agree with their 1 nation, 1 vote implementation, why? After all, it is making some people's votes worth more than others. Shouldn't votes be proportional to the number of citizens of each nation?
I would argue that they should also have a bicameral system, where an equal number of votes per nation (which can continue to be 1) is balanced by a proportional system, where votes are per unit of population.
Really?!?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? It didn't do a very good job during the Civil War.
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Wasn't the intention of the founders that Congress be more important than the president? Shouldn't it be the disproportionate allocation of seats in the Senate that gives small states sufficient distortion away from democracy that it's in their interests to stay in the union, rather than a distorted election of the president?
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Our founders were incredibly smart in baking in all kinds of protections into the system. The electoral college preserves the union. Without that it's just a contest to get the most people into a state so that your state can control the election. And at that point there's no reason for farming states to have an interest in being part of the union.
Everything is wrong with what you said. The electoral college preserves the status quo. Without it, states don't control elections, The People do. Without the union, farming-only states would be reamed on trade. If we actually had a contest to get people into states, then the states that treat people like shit would have to stop it, or they'd lose their power. This could only be a good thing.
Re: The horror! (Score:3)
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Our founding fathers never planned for advanced data analytics that has pushed the system into campaigning not for general public, but for a select targeted group.
In federal elections we don't see politicians in New York, California, or Arkansas, Alabama. Because they know for the most part how they are going to vote, but will target Florida, and Ohio and build their policies around the swing states needs and desire. These states should have say on what is going on, however todays analytics is so targete
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It's kind-of-proportional. It's not one seat per x citizens. The combination of the guarantee of at least one seat to each state and the cap of 435 members instated in 1911 prevent it from actually being what you claim it to be. And the requirement for single-member districts promotes gerrymandering, to boot.
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And the requirement for single-member districts promotes gerrymandering, to boot.
What do you mean by "single-member"? Is that a district that has a single person living in it, or a district that encompasses an entire State?
It's the number of members of the house. This is made clear in the WP article linked above.
Technically not true, but I get your point (Score:3, Insightful)
> we're still using the same system of voting wherein the person who receives the most votes may not win.
I get your point. Funny thing is, that's not true. Whomever gets the most votes wins.
That's true in a very simple way for almost all elected officials. What you're referring to ia, of course, onw particular office - the president, the top of the federal government (the federation).
In the early 1950s, many people in the United States forgot what country they live in. This after SCOTUS apparently forgo
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Reform proposals for representative government? (Score:2)
Since you raised the topic of the Senate, my old idea was that they should be reapportioned on a monetary basis based on federal taxes paid. Another dimension of dividing power to prevent abuse. "The Senior Senator from Microsoft is recognized to speak." What could possibly go wrong? (Yeah, I know that it's unlikely that Microsoft pays 1% of the federal tax income, but it's just to illustrate the principle.)
On later reflection, these days I'm more interested in (highly theoretical) no-loser guaranteed-repre
Re:Technically not true, but I get your point (Score:5, Interesting)
Lincoln's actions are certainly interesting from a Constitutional standpoint.
From a legal point of view, Constitution was instituted as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, so one can make a reasoned argument that the treaty or agreement signed by the states is perpetual - there is no secession clause. Some treaties have a clause that a party can end the agreement with 2-year notice or whatever. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union put "perpetual" (forever) right in the title.
From a more philosophical point of view, one might argue that:
1. States, having the right and power to choose to join, must naturally have some right and power to leave. Self-government and all.
2. The powers ceded to the union are ceded - not "but we'll threaten to leave every time we don't get our way".
If states were free to leave whenever they want, the passions of the moment might well see states leaving over different issues. Thinking about what's been going on in Portland, with people demanding that the police be totally dismantled, I could Washington or some state deciding to leave the union this summer because "black lives matter" or because Trump won an election or because Clinton did. The country would, over time, fall apart.
To balance these, I would think the parameters would need to be designed to ensure a state leaves *because the people actually don't want to be part of the US anymore*, not because of the hot issue of the month. For that reason, we'd have something like a 2-year or 3-year notice and waiting period. A cooling-off period, in which citizens of the state might change their mind. The Constitution provides no such process.
Regarding the growth of the federal government vs the states, a chart of federal vs state spending gives a rough but useful useful graphical representation of the growth of the federal government. The federal share of spending was quite low until World War 1, then it dropped right back down when the war ended. (The New Deal, before WW1, seemed like a lot at the time. It was a drop in the bucket compared to today). Same thing for WW2 - the feds did a lot during the war; when WW2 ended federal spending dropped right back down. Then a couple years after WW2 the federal share of government spending (and therefore governing) started rising quickly, and has continued to rise.
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The southern states would have had a much stronger argument (and the north wouldn't have been as anxious to stop them from leaving) if they had left over anything besides slavery. Some things people are willing to die for, and one of those is to stop slavery.
And those who would die to keep it. And the poor folk who had to fight it, well, majestic talk of state's rights got some of them, the state that they were born in got some, and, eventually, invasion got the rest.
Slavery was argued over when creating the Constitution. The only way to create the Union was the detestable "3/5's of a person" thing. Almost from the get-go, whether or not a state banned slavery was the predominant political thread until the Civil War.
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Whatever the legalities, the Articles died on the vine. But it does give lawyers and other nitpickers, such as "sovereign citizens", things to argue about.
As far as leaving the Union, I believe that the method declared as the way to do it is via the Amendment process. Technically, that's correct. I have trouble seeing that actually work, though.
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An amendment could certainly do it.
I can also imagine a state could pass a resolution saying they want to leave, then Congress could pass a resolution saying the United States does not object to California leaving.
A third party observer could say "that's not legal", but if California isn't trying to stay and the US isn't trying to keep them, that pretty much settles it. SCOTUS would rule it a "political question", meaning they wouldn't get involved.
In practice, that wouldn't happen only because, in the cas
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I expect that if any state is allowed to leave, the US will Balkanize. Which, I guess, is the normal progression of very large political entities.
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That's a roger.
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"we may not know who the president is the night of the election or the day after,"
One of the dumbest things in TFS/A. The correct statement is, we may not know who the President Elect is ... The President remains unchanged until January 20. /pedantic
Re: The horror! (Score:2)
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Re: The horror! (Score:2)
It does seem like an organisational issue, doesnâ(TM)t it? Here in the UK, we also generally get the result of an election before we wake up the next day, or for those who stay up, by 3am or so. Some constituencies have turned this in to a competition to see who can report first, with chains of students passing along the ballot boxes and other optimisations to what amounts to a parallel counting problem. It makes for some good reality TV if youâ(TM)re in to politics.
Re: The horror! (Score:2)
I should add the caveat that this is simple check one box kind of ballots. Countries that use systems like alternative transferable votes based on ranking the candidates require more effort, but still, I think time in this case is still down to the level of parallelisation (organisational issue)
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Making sure all votes are counted and properly recorded takes time.
Where I live, somehow we always get election results from 100% hand-counted, 100% paper ballots within 12 hours after the polling places are closed.
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And for those who are going to say we've progressed where this delay isn't necessary, we're still using the same system of voting wherein the person who receives the most votes may not win. How about we progress beyond that?
Yeah, because running up the score in California and Texas absolutely will do great things for the rest of the country.
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My prediction: we won't know who the winner is on the night of the election, but that won't stop Fox News from announcing Trump as the winner.
Remember you heard it here first.
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Please point out the widespread voter fraud in a national election that has you so scared. We'll go ahead and not wait for you to find it, because it doesn't exist.
Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who tries to "modernize" or change something as simple and straightforward as "Take a ballot, tick your preferences, and place in the ballot box for counting" is up to no good.
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Anyone ... is up to no good.
Good is in the eye of the beholder. Be especially careful about what that eye is looking at -- or if they know you're watching, what they don't look at.
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That's not how voting is done. Before you take a ballot there are some checks to get past first. Ie, make sure you name is on the list of registered voters for that polling location, then sign the register, in some places the signature may be checked but not always. If this stuff doesn't line up you can still get a provisional ballot for most states in the US, which is treated similarly to a mail-in ballot (signature is checked by hand and is cross checked to make sure the person with that name and addre
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason paper voting is safer is not that you can't defraud the system you can, easily, they are not handwriting experts checking your signature, or checking your id for fakes. It is good because no single person can perform a fraud that can have any significant effect on the election. I would need a mass conspiracy in order to carry out anything with any real impact.
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Yup, you can fake a signature but you can't fake a signature en-masse. Or in other words, you can do a retail attack but not a wholesale attack.
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That's why all these attempts at voting machines really annoy me. The only way of making elections easier for counting purposes is to centralise and consolidate the votes, which make it easier to attack.
The only system I can think of with allowing a simplified counting system, for immediate results, would be that the voting machine prints out your intended ballot which you still submit to a ballot box. The printer can keep a log to immediately release once voting has closed, but the paper ballots are what d
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Actually in most cases provisional ballots are discarded without review. I encourage everyone to read Greg Palast's exposes on the utter catastrophe which is the US voting system today. While much attention is paid to almost non-existent voter fraud (most cases are people with green cards who think they can vote before becoming citizens), the press corpse carefully ignores the rampant vot ing fraud.
It's revealing that up to the 2000 election exit polls always matched the votes counted to within a point o
What about local elections? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Anyone who tries to "modernize" or change something as simple and straightforward as "Take a ballot, tick your preferences, and place in the ballot box for counting" is up to no good.
That's not how voting is done. Before you take a ballot there are some checks to get past first. Ie, make sure you name is on the list of registered voters for that polling location, then sign the register, in some places the signature may be checked but not always. If this stuff doesn't line up you can still get a provisional ballot for most states in the US, which is treated similarly to a mail-in ballot (signature is checked by hand and is cross checked to make sure the person with that name and address didn't actually vote in person elsewhere, etc). Some places may require something to verify your ID (official id in some places, but sometimes even a bill with your name and address is good enough in many places).
This checking is in essence already a part of the modernization from the early days of the country.
And it shouldn't be. Anyone who is here is affected by the outcome of an election.
Places like Iraq handle it by dunking your thumb in purple ink. If you're there and you haven't been inked yet, you get to vote.
Voter registration is stupid and unnecessary. Signature checking is stupid and unnecessary. ID checking is stupid and unnecessary. The only reason mailing it in is necessary at all this year is because there's a massive fucking pandemic.
Inking someone's thumb is certainly a good way to keep someone from voting more than once. But it does nothing to confirm that someone is entitled to vote in the first place.
Voter registration and signature/ID checking is still important, whether you vote in person or by mail. Voter fraud is extremely rare, because these checks exist. If they didn't, you would see much more fraud, not from lots of non-citizens, but by a small number of miscreants, foreign and domestic, who would exploit such weaknesses to i
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What are you a luddite? Riding a camel was considered safer than any other thing. Yet some jerk introduced automobiles, even though they were a lot inferior to camels.
We can modernize voting -- maybe using hashed receipts things -- better identity proofing, things like that. It may be that the current solutions are bad .. but who is to say better methods won't be thought of .. and let's not forget paper ballots are highly vulnerable to cheating as well. Why is it that people don't believe JFK won Illinois i
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What are you a luddite? Riding a camel was considered safer than any other thing. Yet some jerk introduced automobiles, even though they were a lot inferior to camels.
On the other hand, my car almost never spits on or tries to bite me.
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There are definitely cars out there, that if handled incorrectly, will try to kill you.
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my car almost never spits on or tries to bite me.
You apparently aren't the one performing the upkeep. Cars spit on me and pierce my flesh all the time.
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I drive a FIAT, you insensitive clod!
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Do you still use your hands (Score:2)
to scratch your ass? What are you a luddite? Can't you come up with something better?
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you fully understand the problem.
If you give people a receipt of some kind that can be used to check who they voted for, you've broken anonymity.
Another huge fundamental problem is that digital tallies cannot be directly observed. Physical ballot boxes can. The ability to directly observe the entire process is absolutely critical. As Germany's Federal Constitutional Court found, "the inability to have meaningful public scrutiny meant that electronic voting was unconstitutional".
These are unique problems that cannot be solved with things like "receipts" and "better identity proofing".
Me, and I just explained why. Also Germany, Canada, and many other countries. Also every cyber security expert on the planet, give or take.
False equivalence. Physical ballots are not as vulnerable to large scale tampering as flipping some numbers in a computer.
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That's why the receipt shouldn't leave the voting area. You place a vote for Jack Johnson on an electronic voting machine. It spits out a receipt saying that you voted for Jack Johnson. If it got your vote right, you place it in a slot into a secure container. If it got your vote wrong, you click on the screen and tell the machine to try again until the receipt says "Jack Johnson."
Now, after the v
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Anyone who tries to "modernize" or change something as simple and straightforward as "Take a ballot, tick your preferences, and place in the ballot box for counting" is up to no good.
I'd like to change the "tick your preferences" part and the "counting" part, and I think I'm up to a lot of good. Specifically, I'd like to switch from "plurality" or "first past the post" voting to something better. My preference is approval voting, for its simplicity, though I think STAR voting is probably the best from a technical perspective. Either would end the Duverger's law-enforced two-party system and enable more diverse opinions, which I think would help us recover a tradition of public debate. R
New patent (Score:3)
"A method to reduce voting fraud by using highly compressed bleached sheets of carbon fibers extracted from natural resources."
And There's No Substitute . . . (Score:3)
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As long as it's in a properly controlled area (not mailed), the best way really is scannable marked paper ballots, slipped into a slit in the side of a locked box. Then the stacks of ballots can be run through a machine and quickly scanned, and it's harder to make half marks by accident than it is to push a chad halfway by accident.
But mailed ballots aren't secret enough. It's easy for it to be not secret when you can show someone else your vote before you stuff it in the mailing envelope. Why would you do
Knowing who the victor is (Score:4, Insightful)
We already don't know for sure who the victor is the night of the election in most races. It takes time to count ballots. Most results announced by the news media are based upon projected results. We witnessed this in the Bush v Gore race when Gore conceded that he lost when really the race was too close to call, and then many people were baffled that one party conceding the race dosn't officially make the other guy this winner. The statistics are generally good enough that you can rely on the projected winner being the actual winner, even when using only exit polling.
I used to think that mail in ballots were a big enough chunk of the populace, expecially in some states where it is more common, that they could affect the races. Ie, those who do early voting or who have permanent absentee ballots are a different enough demographic from those who stand in line that it's not negligable. But I have noticed that the projects results based on 75% of votes counted never seem to differ much by the eventual final tally, and counting the mail in ballots later don't seem to affect much either in percentage (ie, a 51/49 win for a proposition on the night of an election only seems to vary by a fraction of a percentage when eventually certified). And this is good I think, it means that mail in voting isn't restricted to just one party or political stance or demographic.
The California elections, and some others, officials for some reason do not count mail in ballots until after the normal ballots are counted, even though there's no reason to delay, all they need to do is verify the signatures and dump the ballot into a box to be counted at the same time as the others. Given that these envelopes just sit around for a couple of weeks untouched, it would seem a good time to get a head start on the signature verification.
Contrary to some news reports - almost all mail in ballots are counted, even if there's a projected winner. Some may be discarded - the signature must match what is on record, and if delivered by mail they generally have to have a post mark before or on the election date. A person may not be allowed to vote at a physical polling location for variousl reasons, and instead are provided with a provisional ballot which then could be rejected for the same reasons. Less than 1% of mail in ballots are rejected, so it's not bad, but it does mean one should take care to follow the instructions correctly when voting by mail.
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It was mostly legal challenges versus legal challenges at that point, regarding counting procedures. Gore's team probably could have drawn out the challenge game for much longer, but he eventually decided to let it go. However, IF the slightly-losing candidate were stubborn, it could have dragged on for many months.
So what? (Score:3)
So what? There's a reason the election is in November and the inauguration isn't until late January. Part of the plan for peaceful transitions was to allow more than enough time for counting, recounting and legal challenges. I would rather have an accurate vote than a quick one.
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**Only** using exit polling? Exit polls are one of the main tools that international ballot observers use to detect vote fraud. Everywhere else in the world a 5% deviation between the exit poll and the counted vote is considered evidence of fraud, and a 10% difference is considered definitive. Only in the Untied States does a 20% variance between the two not even make local news.
The 2000 election was the first one where computerized voting was widespread, and not coincidentally the first where exit polls
Amazing Holmes! How do you do it? (Score:3)
Is there anyone who ever programmed more than a TV remote who believes otherwise?
Fall is coming (Score:2)
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And I'm sure that every single one of the recipients of those incorrectly addressed ballots is going to fraudulently fill it out and return it, under the threat of felony jail time and huge fines.
No, wait; the vast majority of people will shred them / tear them up and throw them away. A few civic minded folk will call the elections board and tell them they've received a ballot they shouldn't have, and be told to shred it / tear it up. A few will call the media, which is why you heard about it at all. And
Get some credibility back into 2020 election (Score:2)
From Jon Schreifels
@JonSchreifels
It's time for a constructive post on how we might be able to get some credibility back into this coming election. I
have several proposals that should probably start in Congress, but much of it has to happen at the State level,
because the Constitution put elections on the State governments.
1. Move the election to the week of Thanksgiving. (Federal issue, I think)
2. Declare the entire week of Thanksgiving a national holiday, just for this one
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No electronic voting until we move it to a blockchain distributed ledger system.
That sounds like a bad idea, tbh
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Yeah. I understand that blockchain is good for metadata, but not good for private data.
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In the case of voting, blockchain seems like a bad idea because it seems relatively simple for the NSA or anyone with a similarly large cluster to rewrite votes.
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I think you're talking about cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Not an issue with blockchain per se.
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Are you sure that being outdoors for many hours in November doing non-physical work is going to be safer for poll workers in northern states? I can see the benefits in terms of virus transmission, but I think you might get pneumonias due to the cold.
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Clearly that was spoken by someone who hasn't spent any measurable time outside of California.
You mean that poll workers can't just spend hours outside where it's freezing, or pouring rain and almost freezing? They need to buck up!
don't need an expert (Score:2)
you don't need to be an expert to get that bit .. pen and paper ballots are the way to go. It's safe , worked for a hundred plus years and thousands of elections have been held that way. Voting machine makers wanting to sell their shit by the millions of units will try to convince you to use their hardware but this ain't the safe way to go. Trust humans. At least .. most of them can't be hacked .. yet .. brain implants may change that .. one day .. who the hell knows .. but for now .. pen paper be safe be
Veracity (Score:4, Insightful)
Electronic and mail in voting have no veracity, they are both fundamentally broken. Electronic voting is broken because it depends on databases or datastores of some kind and no one has ever made one that could be readily used and administered by the public that could not also be readily hacked by the public.
Yes there are theoretical models used by data scientists that might be hack proof in properly subscribed and enforced lab conditions. We don't elections with data scientists as administrators in secure labs. We hold them in school gyms and churches where Bubba the maintenance worker follows the setup directions from Sally the secretary.
Mail in voting is subject to veracity issues that have already started popping up. It's nothing at all like absentee voting where the voter initiates the process and has built in checks and ballots for veracity. With mail in voting anyone can turn in a ballot they find for their favorite candidate, and people have found hundreds of ballots at a time in some places. Stories abound of ballots being sent out to addresses for dead people, people that moved decades ago and so on.
Once the ballots are mailed in, the postal service which has a vested interest is in the outcome is in charge of delivery. They'll have a pretty good idea which areas vote which way and can easily lose, misplace or delay ballots to influence any election they want. Hopefully your postal service clerks are honest unlike some of the others that have gone to court and prison for stealing mail or committing fraud.
Bottom line is that neither one has any veracity, nor do I know a single security professional who claims that either can or could. This is coming from the security field where people love to speak their mind and buck the system. Without veracity the election has no capacity for legitimacy.
Postal workers take an oath (Score:4, Insightful)
Postal workers swear an oath when joining the USPS to:
Support and defend the Constitution of the United States
Protect the U.S. against all foreign and domestic enemies
Be faithful and allegiant to the U.S.
Take this oath freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion
A small number of postal workers may have violated their oath in the past (just as a small number of police, soldiers and politicians have), but to make the unfounded assumption that postal workers who have sworn such an oath would violate it in the name of self-interest by interfering with the election says far more about your character than about theirs. Go fuck yourself.
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The difference between absentee and mail in voting is that, for the former, someone has to request their ballot be sent to them. There's literally no difference after that. We've had multiple states automatically mailing ballots out _before_ this year, some for over a decade, and the voting fraud rates remain less than one hundredth of a percent. Electronic voting is too easy to manipulate, but mail-in voting, yes please.
And if you're going to bring up "veracity issues that have already started popping up",
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The fact that you have to request an absentee ballot to begin with is an enormous difference of its own right. This means that the ballot isn't blindly sent to someone simply because they were once shown as living at an address. That's how you end with dead people, cats and people that moved years or even decades ago getting ballots mailed to them. Some apartment buildings got dozens or even hundreds of extra ballots mailed to them. I won't bother posting all the links or images I found for citations:
https: [jsonline.com]
ballot box stuffing (Score:2)
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It's much harder to do ballot-box stuffing on a massive scale than compromise electronic devices on a massive scale.
Let me get this straight (Score:2)
You mean to tell me that the Republicans are getting everyone to flip out and concentrate on the voting method that's going to be just fine anyway, and stop getting us to concentrate on the ACTUAL problem: digital voting machines? The way things got all mucked up in the 2000 election?
Shocked, I'm telling you. Shocked.
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Keep in mind that the scanners that count the paper ballots are made by the same companies that make the touch screen machines, and are every bit the same black box. Both parties have known since the 1990s about the issues with computerized voting machines, and neither has ever done anything about it. Why do you suppose that is?
I suspect that the DNC is frantically trying to bribe the voting machine companies to ensure Biden loses the election, since no one wants to clean up this clusterfuck.
US Census did it fine (Score:3)
It's interesting to note that the US Census seems to have figured this newfangled online thing out. They assigned every known household with an address a code, then sent a postcard with that code to the address with a "use this code to enter your data" form.
It's not that fucking hard.
The actual voting system in the US isn't as secure as Amazon. The only reason people believe it's secure is that it's awkward to manipulate due to its manual nature. But as history has shown, it's relatively easy to compromise our elections if you try hard enough (right Cook County?)
Instead of measuring security against an absolute, compare it to the current system and the ideal system. Like the Greeks said, the ideal is exactly that: an ideal. Reality will always be different.
Safest voting would be decentralized (Score:2)
Let multiple companies compete for voters by getting a few dollars for everyone the register, with government authorities only verifying eligibility and ensuring you only register with one. Then they can compete on being the most transparent and having a strong chain of ballot custody, with observers from major candidates on each step of the way. There will be incentives to grow customer base by registering all kind of people who have access issues today. And if there are irregularities, they only affect us
While youâ(TM)re at it... (Score:3)
Bring back ink marking voterâ(TM)s finger. Excellent method to prevent a lot of voting fraud.
Huh? (Score:2)
The existing infrastructure is flawed therefore any infrastructure is flawed?
I can't say I'm impressed by this expert.
It is very easy to build a completely secure evoting system. That has never been the problem. The problem is that it's expensive and people would rather take a chance on their candidate winning unfairly. It's cheaper than bring honest.
In the end, nobody really cares about democracy, they care about power and making sure the "wrong" people don't have it.
If people cared about real democracy, w
Yeah but you can't close down polls (Score:2)
Here's an idea.... (Score:2)
I have been using mail in ballots for years now. The idea of driving to some poling station and standing around for hours just doesn't appeal to me. But before we roll it out to the whole country how about we try it in a limited way first? Maybe have a few cities - left and right leaning - try mail in ballots exclusively for a given election. When it's all done see how it measures up.
I have some concerns about going all in on mail in ballots:
1) Fraud. Real or imagined (the small pilot programs would shed so
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"That's why it's better to vote for the most senile candidate. Less likely to harm you except by accident maybe."
Didn't you ever read some books as a child with grand-viziers in it?
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You forget Ronnie Raygun, then. Senile as all hell at the beginning of his first term, easily manipulated by anyone who had his ear, including his wife's astrologer. By the end of his first term it was getting obvious enough to most of DC that the Republicans were seriously considering running Nancy in his place, but the press corpse continued to play nice and hid it.
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It started as a typo, but seemed appropriate so I kept it. Same with 'Untied States'.
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Senile candidates are prone to influence from even bigger jerks who prefer to lurk behind the scenes, pulling the strings of power without ever being the candidate themselves. In fact, they can get away with much more because if anything goes wrong they can just jump ship and climb onboard the next administration.
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What a total line of bullshit. Having invalid signatures on a petition to run does not mean dead people supported her. All it means is that the people she hired at the last minute to try and get on the ballot (a very difficult task) did not do a thorough job. Some of the signatures were living democrats who lived in the wrong district. Some signatures were missing necessary information (such as a complete address).
More importantly, NOT ONE ACTUAL INVALID VOTE WAS EVER MADE, NOR EVEN CLAIMED. The onl
Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on how frequently they update it. Even if it was 100% accurate on January 1st, there are now over 170,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 alone so far this year. The question you should be asking (other than how did the government mismanage the COVID response so badly) is, how many Americans would risk jail time to impersonate a dead person, just to get a single extra vote for their favorite candidate?
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Continuing on your logic, even if 170,000 fraudulent votes were cast spread out through the 50 states, would there be a meaningful effect on any one state's results? In 2016 the only one that would have been in the ballpark was New Hampshire, being decided by less than 3,000 votes; they've had 423 COVID deaths.
I get it that we don't want fraudulent election results, but we also don't want to disenfranchise legit voters for fear of something that isn't happening, and mathematically won't happen.