Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani • Hacker News Board

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#201

Post by ardy42 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #36

yesdocs wrote: post #8

I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more? After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?

> Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more?

> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?

The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.

While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#202

Post by tzs » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #11

kmeisthax wrote: post #2

I sincerely hope that whatever happens with these lawsuits doesn't chill the speech of actual voting machine security research.

I’m reminded of an xkcd alt text, “ There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.” https://xkcd.com/2030/

That's implicitly assuming that you can't do cryptographic voting protocols with paper ballots. That is false. You can in fact make a cryptographic voting system where:

1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.

3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.

4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.

5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.

6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.

7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.

Here is a paper on such a system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

Here is a paper showing how it satisfies item #7: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502

Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.

Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#203

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

bitstan wrote: post #68

user3939382 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m reminded of an xkcd alt text, “ There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.” https://xkcd.com/2030/

Except software does control airplanes and elevators.. Subscribing to this kind of "digital bad" dogma is lazy because you don't have to think for yourself.

Software does control airplanes and elevators. When it fails, it can kill people.

But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.

And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#204

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #134

Ken White has been talking about the potential for this suit for a couple weeks now. He spends a lot of time talking about what isn't defamation --- people use defamation suits and threats thereof to chill free speech, and he's a 1st Amendment guy --- but the Dominion cases are apparently examples of very serious defamation cases. The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damag…

If the court rules that the statements were false, but Giuliani is off his rocker and so Dominion doesn't get their billion, Dominion might still find that an acceptable outcome. They need their reputation at least as much as they need the money; a court ruling that the claims were factually wrong would go a long way toward restoring their reputation.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#205

Post by mbg721 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #200

mbg721 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.

> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#206

Post by ardy42 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

mbg721 wrote: post #205

dragonwriter wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

It wasn't always this vicious , or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

>> The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.

America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#207

Post by ardy42 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

underseacables wrote: post #197

yesdocs wrote: post #8

I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.

> Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.

For the same reason it's (probably) baseless for a coworker of yours to claim you've been embezzling millions from your employer for years. It's basically a false accusation.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#208

Post by throwaway10923 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #177

throwaway23242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh, cabal fact checkers seem to say this link is garbage (do they though?). i will flog myself and pledge allegiance to the cabal to repent.

Even a cursory review of the Ramsland report you linked to indicates it was largely fiction. From the politifact review: Ramsland lists "Fenton" without specifying Fenton City or Fenton Township. But the turnout Ramsland lists for Fenton does not match the turnout in either jurisdiction. The actual turnout statistics reveal the inaccuracy of Ramsland’s numbers. His figure for North Muskegon is off by a factor of 10:…

"A staggering number of votes required adjudication.This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles stillstored on the server.This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots withno oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machineand/or softwareerrors. The systemicerrors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulkadjudication"

" Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack ofproviding basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system securityrequired by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures –Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a federally accredited voting system laboratory "

" Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of recordsprevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed. "

so this is just made up?

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#209

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #50

tartoran wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these based on? Are these just opinions?

Voter machines being unreliable has seemed to be the prevailing opinion in hacker news and similar circles until now. Are they suddenly all okay because Giuliani has spread bs about them?

They are as secure as they were before. But the lies are still lies.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#210

Post by worldsayshi » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #175

worldsayshi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voter machines being unreliable has seemed to be the prevailing opinion in hacker news and similar circles until now. Are they suddenly all okay because Giuliani has spread bs about them?

Voting machines without a paper trail have been deemed unreliable, and still should be deemed unreliable. These machines are used to generate an authoritative paper ballot, which is exactly what critics have demanded. A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.

I don't see the point of a voting machine with a paper trail. You get preliminary statistics a bit faster and you get people used to the idea of voting machines.