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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#271

Post by charonn0 »

cwkoss wrote: post #252
JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would security researchers or watchdogs go around and say things publicly without evidence to defend their claims? Because thats what opened up Rudy for this lawsuit. He made unsubstantiated claims that possibly damaged the reputation of the company. How would this be used against researchers or watchdogs in your opinion?

Voting Machine Company: "Our machines are 100% secure. The security consultant we paid to tell us that agrees." Researcher: "Your machines have USB ports exposed, can flash firmware, connected to the internet, don't produce an auditable paper trail, and I hacked into a machine personally. 100% secure is demonstrably false." Voting Machine Company: "Well, a third party verified that it is 100% secure so we're going to…

Guiliani didn't say any of those things.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#272

Post by unanswered »

ncallaway wrote: post #251
supergirl wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

checking a random sample is not enough for the US election system. in a few states it's decided by a few thousand votes

> checking a random sample is not enough You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough. Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample. In…

Something that struck me about the Arizona hand recount numbers: most of the reporting precincts(? - I use this term in a general sense, I don't remember how the numbers were grouped) reported that hand counts in batches of about 1000 votes showed an accuracy of about 99%, i.e., on the order of 5-10 ballots incorrectly counted (again, rough numbers from memory). But then some of the precincts reported "nope, we found 100% accuracy; no discrepancies", for the same batch sizes. That struck me as odd. There wasn't a spectrum where 0-10 or even 0-20 were the outliers; it was bimodal around 5-10 and 0. Or whatever the actual numbers were, my point is bimodality with a mode at 0. That was odd.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#273

Post by gspr »

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.

Stop excusing the coupmakers.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#274

Post by javajosh »

enraged_camel wrote: post #270
javajosh wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great link, thank you! That's precisely what I was looking for (and I highly recommend it to anyone else reading this thread). It does seem strange to me that we set the bar so high for defamation, but its one of those times where the trade-off is very clear, and it seems like in this particular case "reckless disregard for the truth" seems to fit extremely well.

> It does seem strange to me that we set the bar so high for defamation Well, it's not that strange, if you look at how frequently mere threats of defamation lawsuits are used to chill free speech.

Indeed. The solution, though, is simple: every man woman and child in the USA should just get a law degree!

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#275

Post by dragonwriter »

r00fus wrote: post #97
woofcat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd, I find they're the best. Hold $5k in your chequing account and _everything_ is free! Even got myself a safe deposit box. BMO has something similar but it's $6,000. The rest (last time I checked) didn't really offer something like that.

Honestly, who uses a safe deposit box these days? And what would one use it for?

> Honestly, who uses a safe deposit box these days? And what would one use it for?

Offsite storage of small, highly value items. Important documents especially (e.g.,.duplicate official copies of birth certificates and similar documents as offsite backup, because getting them from the source can be time consuming, and present chicken and egg problems.)

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#276

Post by DonHopkins »

adictator wrote: post #38
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

How would anyone know they are baseless unless a proper investigation is conducted independently? What about the thousands of sworn affidavits? Surely, ALL of them can't be lying.

Yeah, right. And surely Rudy wasn't actually farting in court without wearing a mask. Or dripping black slime down his face beside a dildo store. Or putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room in the Borat movie.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#277

Post by covidthrow »

covidthrow wrote: post #79
rpiguyshy wrote: post #14

before donald trump was ever in office, i always believed that these voting machines are complete bullshit. our entire voting system is bullshit. and it would be easy to fix. these machines have been shown to be massively flawed and vulnerable to hacking/tinkering. again, this was my opinion before donald trump was elected.

And if Trump had won, I suspect most of these comments would be critical of the absolutely sub-par security of our voting infrastructure. But tribalism still rules, so lots of praise abounds about how well things went. Mostly because their opponent lost. Frankly, we need publicly auditable records. For some reason we can request practically any non-classified data from the government... but not fine grained, anonymou…

For a bunch of people who raise hell about the dangers of using SMS for 2FA, I'm a little surprised at the cavalier dismissal of serious institutional and technological shortcomings in one of the most mission critical systems in the world.

I think maybe that's psychological bias at play and not, say, actual affirmation that the system is resilient, let alone adequate. The number of downvotes I've gotten without a single reply is quite suggestive of this.

Seriously disappointed in this community of some of the most enlightened technical and scientific minds in the world, right now...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#278

Post by gamblor956 »

r00fus wrote: post #214
gamblor956 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting by hand takes days, which is why it is only done automatically for close elections. However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed. If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State wil…

Voting by hand takes days - in the US. Not in Finland, France or the many other countries where voting is done by hand 100% successfully for decades with timely results. Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.

Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.

36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.

The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.

What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.

That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).

If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#279

Post by kube-system »

tunesmith wrote: post #239
CydeWeys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dominion voting machines leave an auditable paper trail and thus do support hand-counting of paper ballots, which was done as part of the recounts in disputed states. No discrepancies beyond the margin of error of hand counting were found in those recounts vs the electronically reported results. You can see how they work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9BDiO3JGTs

Still not sufficient though, you only need to hack enough to get outside the automatic recount margin. You also need hand-recount of random samples in all elections.

Of course, if someone hypothetically hacked an election even more brazenly to get outside of that margin, the result would be even more unexpected and likely to be manually contested.
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