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CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

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Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#51

Post by whiteflame7000 »

sicromoft wrote: post #44
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000. I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper b…

Are banks auditable? (Yes.) Do they have paper backups of everything? (Not that I'm aware of.) What's the difference? Honest question.

People notice when you take money from them directly but seldom take notice when its taken from the community chest.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#52

Post by shripadk »

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/12/pennsyl...

I don't understand how you can say the Election was the "most secure" when you literally have a Court in Pennsylvania throw out 10,000 ballots!

If the system was so "secure" it shouldn't have even gone to the Courts in the first place and instead the electoral system should have found out the discrepancies on its own! The truth is that US electoral system is full of flaws and it showed through this election!

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#53

Post by guptaneil »

sicromoft wrote: post #44
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000. I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper b…

Are banks auditable? (Yes.) Do they have paper backups of everything? (Not that I'm aware of.) What's the difference? Honest question.

The difference is that transactions at banks aren’t anonymous.

If you could only see the bank’s final balance with no insight into how much each person deposited and no cash in the vaults, the bank’s reported balance would be pretty meaningless for audit purposes.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#54

Post by callinOutLiars »

kube-system wrote: post #11
nmlnn wrote: post #5

TIL, electronic voting machines are CLOSED SOURCE (hardware and software) - that should be completely unacceptable in an open democracy. It makes me wonder how a statement like this can be proved. > There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised When it comes to something as important as elections the mantra should be: don't trust. verify.

I don’t see security flaws with closed source software that prints backup paper ballots. If anything, it’s better than an open source machine that doesn’t print a paper backup. Those paper backups can be even audited by the voter at the moment they vote. You’re not going to be dumping the source code from a voting machine that is in use.

Security through obscurity is a horrible way to secure anything, but especially voting machines.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#55

Post by magicsmoke »

garyrichardson wrote: post #45
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000. I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper b…

Canadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linearly.. more voters means more ballot boxes and more officials counting and auditing. This seems like a solved problem to me. Why doesn't/wouldn't this work in the US? My guess is the complexity of your ballots -- we typically vote for one person and every coupl…

That and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#56

Post by throwawaysea »

In order to secure the vote we need open source machines, verifiable ballots (including online verification), complete chain of control, body cams on anyone handling ballots, transparency to public and party observers via cameras, multiple isolated tabulations (verifying they all agree), and also strongly verifiable voter ID. Nothing in this process should be left up to chance. I don’t accept the stance that a lack of evidence of fraud means that fraud isn’t happening or that a better process shouldn’t be designed.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#57

Post by shripadk »

idlewords wrote: post #33
endtime wrote: post #9

No chain of custody, closed source voting machines, ballots sent to people who didn't ask for them based on known-bad voter rolls...but sure, I'll just take some random government agency's word for it.

Better than taking some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of the work of thousands of poll workers across the country.

10,000 votes were discarded by a Court in Pennsylvania [1]. At least someone in US is bothered about making sure the elections were held in a legit manner rather than some Hacker News rando's blanket dismissal of allegations of voter irregularities!

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/12/pennsyl...

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#58

Post by [deleted] »

motohagiography wrote: post #41

Was there a reason CISA needed to release a statement? I haven't seen anything controversial in the news. As they say, if you have to say it... I have a few comments going back a couple of years predicting how electronic voting will cause civil unrest because it is so vulnerable to being discredited. Edward Snowden even recently tweeted a prof's video about the same thing. Everybody who had given the issue any seriou…

[deleted]

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#59

Post by snowwrestler »

Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000. I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper b…

There has been progress since 2000. While some states still have electronic-only voting machines, the trend seems to be away from them toward paper mark-and-scan. In addition there is greater awareness of the value of risk-limiting audits. Heck, Georgia is voluntarily hand-recounting their entire presidential ballot. And the debacle in Florida in 2000 has arguably led to better ballot design as well.

I took the CISA statement to be relative to this progress, not a statement of absolute quality.

Re: CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

#60

Post by anonymouse008 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #25
anonymouse008 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your thinking on the “request” process of mail-in ballots? To me, it’s wild to think all one needs to request a ballot is a name, address and ssn... and on top of all of that, you can get the ballot sent to a different address...

This quickly goes down the rabbit hole of identity and identity theft in the USA in a more broad sense. Our entire system is build on similarly flimsy "identity" from banking, to medical records, and even getting copies of a birth certificate/driver's license. I would say though that "scale matters." If an electronic voting system is compromised the "scale" could be the entire state, and millions of votes, but each t…

Right on — the thing that worries me most is that Equifax’s breach didn’t cause much of a stir... someone was/is sitting on that trove of 140m records.
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