Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

thedailybeast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#71

Post by pnathan »

liquidise wrote: post #62
brian-armstrong wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising. But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either u…

> if their influence is either unprecedented

It is. That's the entire point of the "filter bubble" argument that is coming up some 8-10 years old now.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#72

Post by jerf »

Bud wrote: post #43
munk-a wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an action which legitimately needs to be done. I think the larger issue we need to fix is the partisan entrenchment that lets people justify this being done to further their own agendas. Using targeted disenfranchisement to further your own political goals is quite clearly illegal, we just need to start sending people to jail over it instead of excusing it because the ends justify the means.

This isn't really about "partisan entrenchment"; this is not a bipartisan issue. It's an issue with Republicans. There's no history of any large-scale activity like this from Democrats.

To the best of my knowledge, you are correct that Democrats do not typically purge the rolls. Their strategy is to get dead people to vote, and to bus people around to vote fraudulently in multiple districts.

Of course both parties cheat at as large a scale as they can get away with. If nothing else, if you really must conceptualize the Democrats as wholly good without a spot of blemish on them, then how can you believe there are no Democrats who consider it a moral imperative to cheat as much as they can to prevent Republicans from getting in? To think that either party is so ethical that they would never consider cheating at all is to require not only a very high bar of ethics, but a very particular bar of ethics to be met... in the world of politics, with control over the largest economy in the history of the world at stake. Are all Democrats really that purely deontologists?

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#73

Post by lightbyte »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #56
Bud wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really about "partisan entrenchment"; this is not a bipartisan issue. It's an issue with Republicans. There's no history of any large-scale activity like this from Democrats.

The history of Democrats doing this is so rich there's a Constitutional Ammendment addressing it. The current climate only benefits Republicans purging voters, but both sides manipulate voting to benefit themselves.

Are you referring to the 15th or 17th amendment? Both of those were put in place before political parties switched their ideologies. The Republican Party of the 1800s was the liberal party, not the conservative beast it is today.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#74

Post by lurker456 »

liquidise wrote: post #62
brian-armstrong wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising. But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either u…

There are some (poor, outdated, ineffective) checks and balances on the use of traditional media for political advertising. The new media successfully lobbied to be even excluded from those. Additionally, a lot of people who are not in this business were surprised about the extent.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#75

Post by wang_li »

s73ver_ wrote: post #47
wang_li wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and nail to prevent the implementation of processes that would allow the detection of ineligible voters voting. It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts. When you say that only 2 have been charged, why is that relevant?…

You're gonna have to provide proof of that.

Proof of what? That voting fraud happens? It assuredly happens, as does more generalized election fraud. In my state of Washington there have been confirmed cases of people voting their dead family member's ballot[1]. And in the 2004 Gubernatorial election there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory.[2]

Or do you mean that parties fight against efforts to make the voting process more trustworthy? Feel free to search voter id lawsuit in your favorite search engine.

1: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Dead-voted-in-governo... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_gubernatorial_elect...

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#76

Post by wahern »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
Bud wrote: post #4

This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power. It should require federal action, instead.

> It should require federal action Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.

Software means one idiot's algorithm can quickly become every idiot's algorithm.

That said, the urge to federalize everything is troublesome. Democrats want to protect Alabamians from Alabama, but who's gonna protect us when Alabama takes over the federal government?

De-centralization at the very least makes it easier to fix mistakes piecemeal, even if it doesn't prevent everybody from making the same mistake.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#77

Post by mikeash »

wang_li wrote: post #68
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts. Source? Because every [1] source [2] I find [3] says the opposite. [1] http://library.uwp.ac.id/digilib/files/disk1/13/--publicadmi... [2] http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washing…

Your own links say that it happens, but then hand wave it away as not significant. Your [1]: >However, in only 26 cases was there a conviction or a guilty plea by the citizen. From your [2]: >n the state of Washington, for example, six cases of double voting and nineteen instances of individuals voting in the name of the dead yielded twenty-five fraudulent votes From your [3]: >Although Republican activists have repe…

Very few people object to the concept of voter ID. They object to its implementation in the US, which is virtually always done to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

The fight against voter ID laws is really a fight against voter laws accompanied by biased ID requirements and intentional difficulties foisted on the opposition voters.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#78

Post by pasquinelli »

CalChris wrote: post #63
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2016 polling models were pretty good, or at least, as good as they are usually[1]. The problem is, it was a very close race by electoral college standards. Trump ultimately won by 80,000 votes in three states in an election with 136m votes cast[2]. So the 'deciding' votes were just 0.06% of the vote total. I think we can have it both ways. Voter suppression is being done and we have statistical heats in competiti…

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures. Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

has something changed since a bunch of ladies got a constitutional amendment passed banning everyone's favorite beverage and the federal government's main source of income?

say what you will about the temperance movement, they made shit happen.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#79

Post by mjevans »

pulisse wrote: post #7

De rigueur pointer to a discussion of the birthday paradox for those who don't understand why the combination of first name, last name, and birth date is an unavoidably flawed way of uniquely identifying individuals: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-hom... .

Natural keys are no substitute for unique fully synthetic identifiers...

Synthetic identifiers SHOULD identify zero or one entities (zero if the reference is not presently valid).

Upon lookup, /verification/ should still occur at an operator level.

Post reply on HN