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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

#71

Post by evan_ »

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…

> Was there a reason CISA needed to release a statement? I haven't seen anything controversial in the news.

You haven’t been paying attention, then. Trump has been screaming fraud for days. This statement is a direct response to a completely baseless, evidence-free claim he made earlier today that 2.7 million votes for him were destroyed.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by ironmagma »

guptaneil wrote: post #53
sicromoft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are votes anonymous? You write your name on the ballots and they have a barcode.

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

#74

Post by whiteflame7000 »

bitwize wrote: post #35
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…

I don't think you can avoid the politics of the situation because when it comes to presidential candidates, when the R candidate wins, much will be made of how broken the system is, from vulnerabilities in voting machines to fatal flaws in the Constitution itself (viz., the Electoral College). When the D candidate wins, we are assured that election security is airtight, there's no evidence of significant irregulariti…

Every person who downvoted you knows this too. They are being willfully ignorant because they are too smart not to notice at least in the slightest the difference in treatment.

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

#75

Post by gwright »

shripadk wrote: post #52

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 syste…

> have a Court in Pennsylvania throw out 10,000 ballots

* The Constitution says that the state legislatures set the election mechanism.

* The Secretary of the State decided to change the rules on her own without the state legislature's approval.

* The Court ruled that the ballots that were accepted by the Secretary's adjusted rules but that would not be accepted by the legislature's approved rules can not be considered legal ballots and should not be counted.

The court didn't "throw out ballots". The court ruled that the Secretary of the State overstepped her authority and that ballots must be processed according the the rules established by the legislature.

This seems utterly straightforward to me but it is entirely possible I'm missing some important detail.

If you disagree with that chain of reasoning, what is your disagreement?

My understanding is that the ballots in question are not part of the current vote count in PA and so this ruling changes nothing with regard to the electoral votes from PA.

At best this was sloppy and careless behavior by the election bureaucracy, at worst it was an unjustifiable power grab.

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

#77

Post by 0xy »

vga805 wrote: post #70
0xy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deployed a mystery closed-source software update right before the election. No matter which way you slice this, it's sheer incompetence and smells fishy (even if it isn't fraud). If you want to project security, you don't do this kind of thing. It's insane. It's like the plot of a Hollywood movie.

do you have a source for this? i don't doubt it's true, i am compiling evidence for claims like this

Sure, here's the source. [1]

[1] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/spalding-county-experiencin...

"vendor for the machines notified them at 7:05 a.m. that there was a problem with an overnight update to the system"

"They just said it was a glitch in the system"

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

#78

Post by aw1621107 »

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.

> 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

I suppose it might depend on how you read that statement. One person might read it as "There is no evidence (that exists/that will exist) that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised", in which case some backing would be desirable. Another person might read it more like "There is no evidence (that we're aware of) that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised", in which case proof technically doesn't need to be provided, as one can truthfully state that they are not aware of evidence of an event independently of whether that event occurred or not.

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

#79

Post by guptaneil »

ironmagma wrote: post #73
guptaneil wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are votes anonymous? You write your name on the ballots and they have a barcode.

We can know _who_ voted, but not _how_ they voted. These are explicitly kept separate so that you can’t sell your vote or be persecuted for how you voted.

We might know which 10 people put money in a bank, but without transaction amounts, it still doesn’t help with the audit.

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

#80

Post by refurb »

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…

The ballots are much simpler in Canada. I remember getting a ballot that was the size of a 4' x 6' card. Put a check next to the candidate you want as the MP in your riding. Done.

The US ones can be multiple pages where you end up voting for a dozen candidates across multiple federal, state and local offices, plus a number of ballot initiatives. It's kind of nuts.

But I agree the old fashion paper and pen is the best system. It doesn't matter how theoretically secure some high-tech digital voting system is - unless every voter can understand how it works you'll always have people who think it's fixed. Actually, even with paper and pen people will think it's fixed, but you at least eliminate a ton of the unknown because of the physical record.

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