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They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

theguardian.com

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Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#91

Post by clarkevans »

organsnyder wrote: post #84
paulgb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?

In some jurisdictions, it's possible to vote in person after voting absentee (the absentee ballot is then destroyed without being counted). Any system will have trade-offs, though—since ballot access (getting time off from work, childcare, transportation) appears to be a much more pervasive problem than coercion, it seems like the sacrifice would be worth it.

I believe it is that you could replace the sealed envelope that your ballot comes in. Once the envelopes are opened, they are separated from the ballots inside them.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#92

Post by [deleted] »

neilv wrote: post #62
davidw wrote: post #57

Happy with my Senator Ron Wyden's take on this: paper ballots. He's also mentioned in the article. Our system here in Oregon works pretty well: you vote by mail with paper ballots and there's automatic voter registration.

One of the downsides of vote-by-mail is that it makes some ways of buying votes easier. But it does have the upside of making participation easier (especially for people overburdened with work or other responsibilities). And the physical paper auditing trail makes it immensely better than all the electronic systems without that record.

[deleted]

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#93

Post by manacit »

joshfraser wrote: post #88
deburo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If you're asked to waive your right by your employer, I'm pretty sure you can get them in trouble by going to the media and make a fuss about it. This is a silly hypothesis.

It's no different from an evil employer who forces their employees to vote and send a picture of their ballot today. Sure, taking a photo of a ballot is illegal, but that's not going to prevent it from happening when you're behind that little curtain. Coercing people to vote for your guy is illegal in both scenarios and you can and will get in trouble if you try and pull that stunt at any significant scale.

When you vote on a paper ballot, you are entitled to request a new sheet of paper if you've messed up a vote. In effect, this would allow you to take a picture of one ballot, toss it, and get another.

So, yes, it is quite different - an employer has no way to validate that an employee has voted a specific way. Any proof is not indicative of the final vote, unlike the proposed Blockchain solution.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#94

Post by dogcomplex »

amenghra wrote: post #78
paulgb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?

Once you go online (not to be confused with electronic-in-person), you cant really hide your vote. Whoever is buying your vote can instead buy your credentials to vote.

Not if you can re-establish credentials after selling them and cast a second vote that silently spoils whatever the buyer sends. Though that might count as electronic-in-person, as you'd need some unsellable credential (e.g. live video of you showing your ID and the date-time, sending a fingerprint, etc) which can take precedence over the one you sold (a username/password, an earlier-dated video/fingerprint/whatever, etc).

But then I guess the buyer just waits til the deadline, and buys the live video of you establishing credentials and casting your vote for them, so you can't fraud them... seems a lot more convoluted though.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#95

Post by thwythwy »

tptacek wrote: post #41

If you want to have strong opinions about voting security, you should do as Matt Blaze recommends and sign up to be an election judge. I did it after my business partner 'lvh did, presumably at Blaze's urging, and he's right: you really can't comprehend fully what's going on in an election until you've worked on one firsthand. A lot of things you'd be inclined to think are major security problems probably aren't, and…

How do I do that in the Bay Area?

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#96

Post by amalcon »

paulgb wrote: post #67
the_snooze wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it. For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a cert…

> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?

The best mechanism for that is old fashioned investigative work, e.g. in the North Carolina 9th district election.

The worry is that, if everything works this way, some of the indicators used to discover this sort of thing are diluted. E.g. the first indicators in the NC 9th case were that one county in this district had a lot more absentee ballots than elsewhere, and the absentee ballots favored one candidate by an implausible margin. If all ballots are absentee, the former measure becomes useless and the latter becomes a much weaker signal.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#97

Post by Balgair »

thwythwy wrote: post #95
tptacek wrote: post #41

If you want to have strong opinions about voting security, you should do as Matt Blaze recommends and sign up to be an election judge. I did it after my business partner 'lvh did, presumably at Blaze's urging, and he's right: you really can't comprehend fully what's going on in an election until you've worked on one firsthand. A lot of things you'd be inclined to think are major security problems probably aren't, and…

How do I do that in the Bay Area?

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/serve-poll-worker

It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#98

Post by sciurus »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #63
5trokerac3 wrote: post #11

> “To say that they don’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing is not to say that nothing untoward happened,” Raskin said. “It’s simply to say that we don’t have the evidence of it.” What kind of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" nonsense is this? Why doesn't this article talk about how DHS was caught red-handed hacking into GA election systems?

Because it wasn't true: https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/339734-investigatio...

Then Secretary of State and now Governor Brian Kemp has a history of falsely claiming groups he doesn't like are hacking GA election systems.

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/prob...

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#99

Post by ryanmarsh »

The dichotomy between our pride in the power of the individual to cast their vote and be represented in government, and the facts of how voting and vote counting happens (the security of the systems and the conflicts of interest involved) is so stark a contrast that I can only assume there are forces at work which have achieved full capture.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#100

Post by henrikschroder »

logfromblammo wrote: post #53
rectang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

The voting system sends out postcards to registered voters with a temper-evident scratch-off covering, over a private key. This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it. The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, befo…

Fantastic.

Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and trust your system.

And then you can compare that explanation to the explanation for paper ballots, envelopes, and voting urns.

The public's trust in a voting system is a very important feature of that voting system. That the public can participate in voting is also a very important feature. If voting is relegated to a black box that everyone should trust, because, pinky promise, a very clever person designed the black box, then people will stop trusting voting.

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