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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#291

Post by triceratops »

tunesmith wrote: post #228
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

The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side. There have been plenty of good reasons to suspect electronic voting in the past, at least in the absence of verifiable paper backups and regular random sampling recounts of those paper ballots. Which is still a pretty rare practice, isn't it? In the absence of those standards, it's still reasonable to…

> The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side.

That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#292

Post by tw04 »

unanswered wrote: post #261
HelloMcFly wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's either that or find more credible evidence. Scott Adams isn't credible, period. While that doesn't make him de facto wrong on any argument, it means you cannot expect the recipients of your message to put the work in (that you've chosen not to) to validate whether this time he's operating in good faith.

You're not responding to the argument at all. Scott Adams' credibility is irrelevant. The video was shown for the segments of it depicting actual events as they happened, not for the segments featuring Adams.

It's absolutely relevant. Adams is taking snippets of videos completely out of context to try to tell a story. He's known to do this. And just watching the start of the video that's exactly what he's doing here.

Why would anyone waste their time tracking down the original videos when they already know, out of the gate, that he's taken things out of context? That's a waste of everyone's time, and EXACTLY why he's doing what he's doing. He knows most people won't bother to fact check his lies.

The correct course of action is to tell everyone what he does, and until he proves he's changed his stripes and starts acting in good faith, to ignore him.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#293

Post by kube-system »

unanswered wrote: post #272
ncallaway wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think it's relatively common for errors caused by engineering processes to exhibit a pattern that isn't evenly distributed.

As a made up example: maybe some precincts had scanners that worked 100% perfectly, and some had units that occasionally mis-scanned with a rhythm.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#294

Post by Me1000 »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #194
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

I'm not saying they were hacked. I'm saying the layman needs to be confident beyond a reasonable doubt. A normal non-security professional needs to understand and have confidence in the system they use to vote. Most people don't even know how to troubleshoot computer issues beyond rebooting, let alone understanding complex IT security or auditing measures put in place for these machines.

If you watch the video you can see that a layman would easily understand how it all works. It literally prints a ballot where you can verify your choices, and you drop it off.

This is pretty much the gold standard: a paper trail that can be audited every step of the process.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#295

Post by pdonis »

jonas21 wrote: post #262
tunesmith wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side. There have been plenty of good reasons to suspect electronic voting in the past, at least in the absence of verifiable paper backups and regular random sampling recounts of those paper ballots. Which is still a pretty rare practice, isn't it? In the absence of those standards, it's still reasonable to…

But that's the thing about Dominion -- their machines do generate a paper trail, and this paper trail was audited. One of the big pushes to secure this election compared to previous ones was to use as many voting machines with auditable paper trails as possible.

> their machines do generate a paper trail

Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.

If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.

If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#296

Post by david927 »

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.

Here's a John Oliver special from a year ago that will terrify you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#297

Post by HelloMcFly »

unanswered wrote: post #261
HelloMcFly wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's either that or find more credible evidence. Scott Adams isn't credible, period. While that doesn't make him de facto wrong on any argument, it means you cannot expect the recipients of your message to put the work in (that you've chosen not to) to validate whether this time he's operating in good faith.

You're not responding to the argument at all. Scott Adams' credibility is irrelevant. The video was shown for the segments of it depicting actual events as they happened, not for the segments featuring Adams.

Your original comment is flagged and I can't see it so did not watch the video.

I believe my comment is relevant to the one I replied to: I do not trust Scott Adams to present his content with any integrity at all, and so sending me a video he clipped together to make a point is not what I'd consider "good evidence". He does not act in good faith, he works backwards from a conclusion. If Steven Miller made a similar video about immigration I wouldn't trust it either without an in-depth review of the sources he relied on. I do not mean for this to be some ad hominen policy, I am not saying Adams and Miller are by default wrong because of who they are, but they don't deserve anyone's trust.

If I have missed some nuance because I couldn't watch the Adams video for myself then you have my apologies for this misunderstanding.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#298

Post by r00fus »

gamblor956 wrote: post #278
r00fus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You scale by district. You just get more people involved in the counting per ballot location.

It's a scalable method. Yes, the reconfirmation at the regional levels are important.

Your faith in machines is questionable. I leave you with this obligatory xkcd - it's still completely valid: https://xkcd.com/2030/

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#299

Post by mountainboy »

tgb wrote: post #62
corey_moncure wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a heavy Slashdot user before the takeover, and now Hacker News fills the hole in my browsing that Slashdot left. If you're like me, you'll remember the many articles about the vulnerability of Diebold voting machines. This has always been a concern, since at least the early '00s or before. I guess people have a very selective amnesia.

Modern machines differ from old ones is a very significant way: they give you a paper ballot that you - the voter - can verify before submitting.

I am not an expert but what I've read is that in the Dominion system, when a Ballot Marking Device is used, it generates a QR code representing the vote in addition to the human readable ballot. Next, the ballot reader machine reads the QR code, not the human readable portion.

Assuming this is true, it would be simple to modify the printing software such that the QR code vote is different from the human readable vote.

A recount, by running the paper ballots through the machine again, would come up with the same result as the first time.

The only way to catch it would be to hand-count the paper ballots and compare the results to the machine counted votes.

Really though, the QR code should be eliminated, so that the voter is able to personally verify what the machine will actually read.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#300

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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

> the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626

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